“Attention is no more than this--the power of giving your mind to what you are about--the bigger the better so far as the mind goes, and great minds do great things; but have you never known a person with a great mind, ‘real genius,’ his friends say, who goes through life without accomplishing anything? It is just because he wants the power to ‘turn on,’ so to speak, the whole of his great mind; he is unable to bring the whole of his power to bear on the subject in hand. ‘But Kitty?’ Yes, Kitty must get this power of ‘turning on.’ She must be taught to give her mind to sums and reading, and even to dusters. Go slowly; a little to-day and a little more to-morrow. In the first place, her lessons must be made _interesting_. Do not let her scramble through a page of ‘reading,’ for instance, spelling every third word and then waiting to be told what it spells, but see that every day she learns a certain number of new words--six, twelve, twenty, as she is able to hear them; not ‘spellings’--terrible invention!--but words that occur in a few lines of some book of stories or rhymes; and these she should know, not by spelling, but by _sight_. It does not matter whether the new words be long or short, in one syllable or in four, but let them be _interesting_ words. For instance, suppose her task for to-day be ‘Little Jack Horner,’ she should learn to know, _by sight_, thumb, plum, Christmas, corner, &c., before she begins to read the rhyme; make ‘plum’ with her loose letters, print it on her slate, let her find it elsewhere in her book, any device you can think of, so that ‘plum’ is brought before her eyes half-a-dozen times, and each time recognised and named. Then, when it comes in the reading lesson, it is an old friend, read off with delight. Let every day bring the complete mastery of a few new words, as well as the keeping up of the old ones. At the rate of only six a day she will learn, say, fifteen hundred in a year; in other words, she will have learned to read! And if it do not prove to be reading without tears and reading with _attention_, I shall not presume to make another suggestion about the dear little girl’s education. “But do not let the lesson last more than ten minutes, and insist, with brisk, bright determination, on the child’s full concentrated attention of eye and mind for the whole ten minutes. Do not allow a moment’s dawdling at lessons.