The case was equally bad when literature was constituted the center of the scheme, and when it was attached to a scheme having some other center--geography, for example, or history. For in the first case it was altogether likely that some detail or aspect of the piece of literature, merely subsidiary in the literature, would be selected for emphasis and elevated into the correlating detail; the background or setting would be taken out for study and elaboration, crowding the action, the human and really literary elements, out of sight. As, for example--and it is an authentic example of a scheme of correlation--the first-grade children are given as the center of their work _The Old Woman Who Found the Sixpence_; from this story we take out the dog, which we study as the type of _digitigrade carnivora_. Or--again an authentic example--having read to the first grade _The Musicians of Bremen_, as one of them happens to be a donkey, we seize the opportunity to teach in detail and over several weeks of time, the physical peculiarities of the donkey and his kinsman the horse, among many exercises drawing out of the children some speculation or information as to how much water or hay the horse consumes; to which hook we attach instruction as to weights and measures; and so on into the remote fringes of information about objects and persons used in the story only in the literary way. In the second case, that in which literature is attached to some other center, in feeling about for some bit of literature to fit into a geographical fact, a meteorological condition, or a historical event, the teacher was quite likely to hit upon a third- or fourth-rate specimen, unsuitable for his children in other respects, and in teaching it he was likely to force from it a meaning and an emphasis that as literature it would not bear; as, when the children were studying the migration of birds, he taught them Bryant's "To a Waterfowl," emphasizing the migration and ignoring the true emphasis of the poem--the lesson of a guiding providence; or as, _apropos_ of December weather, he set the fifth grade to reading Whittier's slow-moving, meditative, and much too mature "Snow-Bound."