What can boys do? Judging by their grand exhibit, we thought to ourselves “they can do almost anything!” Some boys who attend one of the uptown schools on the east side had formed a club for home work and study in mechanics, and there was a table filled with their work. It was chiefly models in wood of real things the boys had seen—a crane, a dumb-waiter, a stone-saw, a pile-driver, and other mechanical implements. It was all excellent work, but it was home work done out of school hours. [Illustration: EXHIBIT OF THE HEBREW TECHNICAL INSTITUTE.] The opposite table showed school work done by the boys of the Hebrew Technical Institute. Those young master mechanics, it seems, attended school every day and at the same time learned the use of tools, the pencil, the saw, the hammer, and the plane. First of all, every boy had to learn to draw, not merely to make a pretty picture of something, but to make a regular working-drawing, so that the real thing could be constructed from it, and so that when the thing is finished, the drawing will be a true picture of it, whatever it may be. So we found there regular graded lessons in drawing, and in making joints in wood, and in construction. As the boy improves, he studies pattern-making and learns to make a mold from the pattern, and to melt lead and make a casting. We saw all the carpentry lessons arranged in order, and glanced at every lesson a boy has to take, from learning to draw to making a step-ladder. There were stools, tables, small bureaus, and other furniture made, finished, stained, and varnished by boys in the school. There was even a window-frame ready to put in the wall of a house, with sash, blinds, and all, complete and in working order; and the boy who made it was only fourteen years old. There are in every school queer girls or odd boys who somehow fail often and are at the foot of every class. These children may be as bright as any, but there is nothing in the school to bring them out. In this exhibition we found the work of some such girls and boys. They see beautiful things in fields and wood, and they have wise teachers. It is not every child that can express itself in a composition. These boys and girls express the ideas that are in them with a pencil. They study real, living things, plants and flowers, and they learn to place the forms of these things on paper and add to them something of their own day-dreams, and soon every one who sees them exclaims: “What beautiful designs!” These so-called dull children who never can understand the multiplication table, and who shed useless tears over the tables of weights and measures, here find the right kind of school for them: and they appeared, with their work, in this children’s exhibition, as bright, as interested, as eager to learn as any prize-medal scholar in any grammar school.