5. Trying to awaken the mental energy and action of a class as they move on through a masterpiece, requires constant watchfulness to keep alive their sense-perceptions and memories, and to touch their imaginations into constructive effort at every turn in the road. Through the direct action of the senses the children have accumulated much variety of sense-materials, of country and town, of hill, valley, river, lake, fields, buildings, industries, roads, homes, gardens, seasons. Out of this vast and varied quarry they are able to gather materials with which to construct any landscape or situation you may desire. Give the children abundance of opportunity to use these collected riches, and to construct, each in his own way, the scenes and pictures that the poet's art so vividly suggests. Many of the questions we ask of children are designed simply to recall and reawaken images which lie dormant in their minds, or, on the other hand, to find out whether they can combine their old sense-perceptions so skilfully and vividly as to realize the present situation. Keen and apt questions will reach down into the depth of a child's life experiences and bring up concrete images which the fancy then modifies and adjusts to the present need. The teacher may often suggest something in his own observations to kindle like memories in theirs. Or, if the subject seems unfamiliar, he may bring on a picture from book or magazine. Sometimes a sketch or diagram on the board may give sense-precision and definiteness to the object discussed, even though it be rudely drawn. This constant appeal to what is real and tangible and experimental, not only locates things definitely in time and space, makes clear and plain what was hazy or meaningless, awakens interest by connecting the story or description with former experiences, but it sets in action the creative imagination which shapes and builds up new and pleasing structures, combining old and new. This kind of mental elaboration, which reaches back into the senses and forward into the imagination, is what gives mobility and adjustability to our mental resources. It is not stiff and rigid and refractory knowledge that we need. Ideas may retain their truth and strength, their inward quality, and still submit to infinite variations and adjustments. Water is one of the most serviceable of all nature's compounds, because it has such mobility of form, such capacity to dissolve and take into solution other substances, or of being absorbed and even lost sight of in other bodies. The ideas we have gathered and stored up from all sources are our building materials; the imagination is the architect who conceives the plan and directs the use of different materials in the growth of the new structures. The teacher's chief function in reading classes is, on the one hand, to see that children revive and utilize their sense-knowledge, and on the other, to wake the sleeping giant and