I had often wondered; but these reflections of my old schoolmate gave me an inkling of what the main difference is. To us, school had been a place in which we learned lessons from books--books of arithmetic, books of grammar, or other purely academic books. For five days of the week our childish minds were held to our lessons; and our lessons, without exception, dealt with technicalities--parts of speech, laws of mathematics, facts of history, definitions of the terms of geography. Small marvel that Saturday was a gala day to us. It was the one "week day" when we might be unacademic! But children of the present time have no such need of Saturday. They write poems, and paint pictures, and read stories, and "act" them, and plant gardens, and even bake cake, as regular parts of their school routine. The schools are no longer solely, or even predominantly, academic. As for technicalities, where are they in the schools of to- day? As far in the background as the teachers can keep them. Children do not study grammar now; they are given "language work." It entails none of the memorizing of "rules," "exceptions," and "cautions" that the former study of grammar required. History would seem to be learned without that sometime laying hold of "dates." Geography has ceased to be a matter of the "bounding" of states and the learning of the capitals of the various countries; it has become the "story of the earth." And arithmetic--it is "number work" now, and is all but taught without the multiplication tables. How could Saturday be to the children of to-day what it was to the children of yesterday? My old schoolmate's little girl had spoken of "tests." In my school-days we called such minor weekly or fortnightly matters as these, "reviews." We regarded them quite as lightly as my small friend looked upon her "tests." Examinations--they were different, indeed. Twice a year we were expected to stretch our short memories until they neatly covered a series of examination papers, each composed of twenty questions, relating to fully sixteen weeks' accumulation of accurate data on the several subjects--fortunately few--we had so academically been studying. It is little wonder that children of the present day are not called upon to "take" such examinations; not only the manner of their teaching, but the great quantity of subjects taught, make "tests" of frequent occurrence the only practicable examinations. "Children of the present time learn about so many things!" sighed a middle-aged friend of mine after a visit to the school which her small granddaughter attended. "What an array of subjects are brought to their notice, from love of country to domestic science! How do their young minds hold it?"