=Other Surroundings.=--On this school ground there should be a shop of some kind. The resourceful teacher would find a hundred uses for some such center of work. The closets should be so placed and so devised as to be easily supervised. This would prevent them from being moral plague spots, as is too often the case, as we have already said. There should be stables for sheltering horses, if the school is, as it should be, a social center for the community. There should be a flagpole in front of the schoolhouse, from the top of which the stars and stripes should be often unfurled to the breeze. =Number of Pupils.=--In this architecturally attractive building, amid beautiful surroundings both inside and out, there should be, in order to have a good rural school, not less than eighteen or twenty pupils. Where there are fewer the school should be consolidated with a neighboring school. Twenty pupils would give an assurance of educational and social life, instead of the dead monotony which often prevails in the smaller rural school. There should be, during the year, at least eight, and preferably nine, months of school work. =It Will Not Teach Alone.=--But with all of these conditions the school may still be far from effective. All the material equipment--the total environment of the pupils, both inside and outside the building--may be excellent, and still we may fail to find there a good school. Garfield said of his old teacher that Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a pupil on the other made the best kind of college. This indicates an essential factor other than the physical equipment. I remember being once in a store when a man who had bought a saw a few days previously returned it in a wrathful mood. He was angry through and through and declared that the saw was utterly worthless. He had brought it back to reclaim his money. The merchant had a rich vein of humor in his nature and he listened smilingly to the outburst of angry language. Then he merely took the saw, opened his till and handed the man his money, quietly asking, with a twinkle in his eyes for those standing around, "Wouldn't it saw alone?" Now, we may have a fine school ground, or site, with a variety of beautiful trees and clumps of shrubbery; we may have a playground and a school garden; we may have it all splendidly fenced; the schoolhouse may have an artistic appearance and may be kept in excellent repair; it may be well furnished inside with blackboards, seats, library, reference books, good textbooks, and all else that is needed; it may be beautifully decorated; it may have twenty or even more pupils, and yet we may not have a good school. It will not "saw alone"; the one indispensable factor may still be lacking.