Perfect recitation or reading aloud is very rare and difficult to acquire. For a few years there was a tendency to over-emphasis in both, and, in recitation, to teach gesture, for which as a nation we are singularly inapt. This is happily disappearing, simplicity and restraint are regaining their own, at least in the best teaching for girls. As to reading aloud to children it begins to be recognized that it should not be too explicit, nor too emphatic, nor too pointed; that it must leave something for the natural grace of the listener's intelligence to supply and to feel. There is a didactic tone in reading which says, "you are most unintelligent, but listen to ME and there may yet be hope that you will understand." This leaves the "poor creatures" of the class still unmoved and unenlightened; "the child is not awakened," while the more sensitive minds are irritated; they can feel it as an impertinence without quite knowing why they are hurt. It is a question of manners and consideration which is perceptible to them, for they like what is best--sympathy and suggestiveness rather than hammering in. They can help each other by their simple insight into these things when they read aloud, and if a reading lesson in class is conducted as an exercise in criticism it is full of interest. The frank good-nature and gravity of twelve-year-old critics makes their operations quite painless, and they are accepted with equal good humour and gravity, no one wasting any emotion and a great deal of good sense being exchanged. Conversation, as conversation, is hard to teach, we can only lead the way and lay down a few principles which keep it in the right path. These commonplaces of warning, as old as civilization itself, belong to manners and to fundamental unselfishness, but obvious as they are they have to be said and to be repeated and enforced until they become matters of course. Not to seem bored, not to interrupt, not to contradict, not to make personal remarks, not to talk of oneself (some one was naive enough to say "then what is there to talk of"), not to get heated and not to look cold, not to do all the talking and not to be silent, not to advance if the ground seems uncertain, and to be sensitively attentive to what jars--all these and other things are troublesome to obtain, but exceedingly necessary. And even observing them all we may be just as far from conversation as before; how often among English people, through shyness or otherwise, it simply faints from inanition. We can at least teach that a first essential is to have something to say, and that the best preparation of mind is thought and reading and observation, to be interested in many things, and to give enough personal application to a few things as to have something worth saying about them.