What is said in the editorial of this number on “The Opening Days of a History Course” has a deep significance at the beginning of the work in Ancient History. Such work normally comes in the first year of the high school course. The pupils are fresh from the grammar schools, and unused to the kind of work they will have to do in the high school. The child of educated parents, from a more or less cultivated home, will take to the work readily enough. What about some of the others, who may ask, “Why do we have to study this stuff? We do not care about these old people.” The writer has to confess that, owing to a visit to the British Museum when he was about five years old, the first association of ideas that comes to his mind when the Egyptians are mentioned is of a lot of mummies. To many of our pupils is there not a danger that ancient history shall seem to them like an exhibition of mummies rather than of people who lived and moved and worked like ourselves? It would seem, therefore, that the wise teacher will begin, not by plunging into a recitation on the first five or ten pages (I have heard of thirty-five pages being assigned in a city high school), but by being polite, and introducing the young strangers to their task and its meaning. Tell them that they have come to the high school to become educated people; that all educated people read a great deal; that in their later reading they will very often come across references to the old world peoples; with the rise and fall of their empires; their creeds, their superstitions, the wicked things some of them did, the good that is to be found in many of their codes. Above all, the young student is to be taught that from these early peoples have come directly the majority of the things that make up civilized life of to-day; we are their debtors. The antiquity of civilization needs to be impressed. Owing to the great mechanical advances of the time since steam power came in to use, I find that young people are prone to think of all the ages back of the nineteenth century as very crude and comfortless. But they should be made to feel that in many ways this is untrue. George Washington lived a comfortable life without the telephone and the Pullman car. And it is a fact that, barring the printed page and the use of gunpowder and the advantages of the compass, a high-class Citizen of ancient Babylon, Nineveh or Memphis, probably lived nearly as comfortably as did Washington; certainly the men of the Roman Empire had many more conveniences and refinements than he had. The young pupil, then, needs to be stimulated to his task by a wise presentation of such facts as those cited. The Dim Background.