At a certain age a circus can hold over heaven or anything else, in a boy's mind, and as long as the circus does not hurt him, why not shut up shop a half a day and let him go? If you keep him in school he won't learn anything, and he will go to the circus in the evening, and be up half the night seeing the canvas men tear down the tent and load up, and the next day he is all played out and not worth a continental. To some it would look foolish to dismiss school for a circus, but it will cement a friendship between teachers and scholars that nothing else could. Suppose, a day or two before a circus arrives, the teacher should say to the school: “Now I want you kids to go through your studies like a tramp through a boiled dinner, and when the circus comes we will close up this ranch and all go the circus, and if any of you can't raise the money to go, leave your names on my desk and I will see you inside the tent if I have to pawn my shirt.” Of course it is a male teacher we are supposing said this. Well, don't you suppose those boys and girls would study? They would fairly whoop it up. And then suppose the teacher found forty boys that hadn't any money to go, and he had no school funds to be used for such a purpose. How long would it take him to collect the money by going around among business men who had been boys themselves? He would go into a store and say he was trying to raise money to take some of the poor children to the circus, and a dozen hands would go down into a dozen pockets in two jerks of a continued story, and they would all chip in. O, we are too smart. We are trying to fire education into boys with a shotgun, when we ought to get it into them inside of sugar coated pills. Let us turn over a new leaf now, and show these boys that we have got souls in us, and that we want them to have a good time if we don't lay up a cent. A TRYING SITUATION. It was along in the winter, and the prominent church members were having a business meeting in the basement of the church to devise ways and means to pay for the pulpit furniture. The question of an oyster sociable had been decided, and they got to talking about oysters, and one old deaconess asked a deacon if he didn't think raw oysters would go further, at a sociable, than stewed oysters. He said he thought raw oysters would go further but they wouldn't be as satisfying. And then he went on to tell how far a raw oyster went once with him. He said he was at a swell dinner party, with a lady on each side of him, and he was trying to talk to both of them, or carry on two conversations, on two different subjects, at the same time.