My attitude toward this whole perplexing business is one of the greatest tolerance. I doubt seriously whether I could pass an examination in English grammar. A Japanese waiter in a club in my town used to lie in wait for me, when I visited the house at odd hours in search of seclusion, for the purpose of questioning me as to certain perplexing problems in grammar. He had flatteringly chosen me from the club roster as a lettered person, and it was with astonishment that he heard my embarrassed confession that I shared his bewilderment. To any expert grammarians who, inspired by this revelation, begin a laborious investigation of these pages in pursuit of errors, I can only say that I wish them good luck in their adventure. At times I do manifestly stumble, and occasionally the blunder is grievous. A poem of my authorship once appeared in a periodical of the most exacting standards with a singular noun mated to a plural verb. For proof-readers as a class I entertain the greatest veneration. Often a query courteously noted on the margin of a galley has prevented a violence to my mother tongue which I would not consciously inflict upon it. To add to the fury of the grammar hounds, I will state that at times in my life I have been able to read Greek, Latin, Italian, and French without ever knowing anything about the grammar of either of these languages beyond what I worked out for myself as I went along. This method or lack of method is not, I believe, original with me, for there are, or have been, inductive methods of teaching foreign languages which set the student at once to reading and made something rather incidental of the grammar. This is precisely what I should do with English if I were responsible for the instruction of children at the age when it is the fashion to begin hammering grammar into their inhospitable minds. Ignorant of grammar myself, but having--if I may assume so much--an intuitive sense of the proper and effective manner of shaping sentences, there would be no text-books in my schoolroom. All principals, trustees, inspectors, and educational reformers would be excluded from my classes, and I should insist on protection from physical manifestations of their indignation on my way to and from the schoolhouse. The first weeks of my course would be purely conversational. I should test the students for their vulgarities and infelicities, and such instances, registered on the blackboard, would visualize the errors as long as necessary. The reading of indubitably good texts in class would, of course, be part of the programme, and the Bible I should use freely, particularly drawing upon the Old Testament narratives.