Portland’s great educator comes home from his six thousand mile trip, and the twelve hundred teachers of the city are summoned to a general assembly to receive the new ideas and inspiration. The proceedings are opened with music; there is a supervisor of singing, who stands upon the platform, with the bulk of the men teachers on the ground floor, and the bulk of the women up in the gallery. The men are directed to sing: “Soft o’er the fountain, ling’ring falls the Southern moon.” They do not sing loud enough, and the music supervisor jumps up and shouts: “Sing until you break the chandeliers.” After which it is the women’s turn; they answer: “Nita! Juanita! Ask thy soul if we should part.” The men sing another verse, and the women answer—the sarcastic young lady teachers who told me about this performance described it as “the Romeo and Juliet stunt.” Next they sing, “In the gloaming, oh, my darling”—in the same “Romeo and Juliet” fashion. I have before me the “School Bulletin” for two successive years, which provides the texts of these chandelier-breaking melodies; also, “Just a song at twilight, When the lights are low,” and “Maxwelton’s braes are bonnie, Where early fa’s the dew.” Now Mr. Grout rises, and a hushed silence falls upon the twelve hundred men and women teachers. The time for new ideas and inspirations has come. Mr. Grout has brought a really new idea: poetry is to be taught to the children, and he opens a normal school right there and then, to teach the teachers how to teach it. His method is to repeat one line of the poem, and then have the twelve hundred teachers recite this after him; then he repeats another line of the poem, and the teachers recite that; then he repeats the two lines together, and the teachers recite the two; then he goes on to the next two lines, and so on, until all the twelve hundred teachers are able to recite the entire poem correctly. Such is the newest pedagogic discovery, for which the people of Portland were paying a salary of six hundred and twenty-five dollars per month, plus a car allowance of fifty dollars per month, plus a traveling allowance of a hundred and thirty-eight dollars and sixty-one cents per month. It depends upon the poem, you may say. So I give you the poem which Mr. Grout thus taught to the twelve hundred assembled teachers of Portland. Lest you find it incredible, I specify that when the teachers recited it to me, I also found it incredible; I made two or three of them recite it in turn, so as to make sure they really knew it. Later on, I made them send me a copy of the “School Bulletin,” in which the poem was printed for the benefit of any of the twelve hundred who might have forgotten it. Here it is, word for word, and punctuation mark for punctuation mark: