room, and put in some nice, clean sand. There, fly up on your perch, and sing me a song while I do it.

5. "I shall not hurt you, for I love you too well; and if I did not love you, I think I should not wish to hurt you. I dare say you feel pain just as I do.

6. "You droll bird! Why, you can sit on one leg! What have you done with your right leg? Oh ! I see it; there it is.. Now, stretch out your wing and scrape your beak on the perch, just as if you knew it was the way to clean it.

7. "And now for your bath. Yes; I must put your head into the glass, and wash your face. Oh! you may shake your head; but the bath will do you good. Now let us dip your feet into the bath; if you do not wash your feet, you will be lame. My book on birds tells me so.

8. "Ah! you rogue! You turn your head on one side, and look so sly. You can see the seedbag, and you know you will soon have your box full of hemp-seed. There, now it is quite fit for you; and you may eat and drink all you want.

9. "Now, good-by; you can sing, and eat and drink, and hop up and down, and jump from perch to perch, till I come back. I shall not be home till the sun sets, and then I shall put a shade on your cage to hide the light of the lamp from you, so that you may go to sleep."*

The teacher is referred to the Preface for some remarks on the subject of spelling. It may be well to use some of the simplest of the consonant combinations (p. 18, &c.) as drilling exercises, both in spelling and articulation. The more difficult combinations may be reserved till the learner is well advanced.

A CHILD'S PRAYER.

37

V. A PRAYER FOR A PURE HEART.

1. LORD! make me a clean heart within;
Close my soul's door 'gainst every sin;
Drive all things evil from my breast;
Let no ill spirit in me rest.

2. To Thee my gate I open wide;
O, come, and with my soul a-bide!
All wick'ed-ness far from it chase,
And make it virtue's dwelling-place.

3. And grant me, Lord, through faith to see
That better life, pre-pared for me;

And may

I ev-er-more be thine!

Hear, Fa'ther, hear this prayer of mine!

A sing-song mode of delivering verse should be checked. The use of the a-pos'tro-phe (line 2) in 'gainst, a contraction of against, should be explained. For the pronunciation of this word, see Exercise 6; for that of with, see 26;

1. A MAN was ly'ing in the shade of an oak-tree, and looking at a pump'kin which was grow'ing in a gar'den close by. He shook his head, and said, Well, well! Here seems to be a mis-take.

66

2. "It does not ap-pear quite right to me, that the little creep'ing pump'kin-vine should pro-duce3 such a large, splen'did fruit, and the large, no'ble oak-tree should bring forth such a poor little one.

3. "Now, if I had made the world, the oak-tree should have made a splen'did ap-pear'ance, with large pumpkins as yellow as gold, and heav'y as a can'nonball."

4. Hardly had he said this, when an a'corn dropped from the tree, and struck him so sharply on the nose as to make it bleed.

5. He started to his feet, and ex-claimed, "It is all right, after all! If this a'corn had been a pumpkin, my head would have been broken, to a certain-ty!"

6. God has made the whole world in wis'dom and in love; and where we cannot un-der-stand the uses of things, we should be-lieve that God, who sees their be-gin'nings and their ends, is the best judge.

7. Learn to trust in God, and to be-lieve that all He does for us is for the best.

virtue,EI; evil, open, 17, 18. The sound of the second vowel in these last two words should be dropped. Pay especial heed to the meaning of italicized letters in the Exercises of Part I. See remarks on page 10. It may often be well to drill a class upon a single Exercise several minutes. A drill of minutes upon a single word may be time saved in the end.

(1, 6, 12, 15, 38, 233, 246-7, 263, 305, 303, 310, 313, 317.)

1. WOULD you like to know how our school-mistress used to teach us spell'ing? I will tell you. Here is a picture of it all.

2. We will sup-pose that we have just finished a lesson in read'ing. We have closed our books. Our school-mistress has asked us the subject of our lesson. One of the boys re-plies, " At-ten'tion is the sub'ject."

3. "Right!" says the school-mistress; "now, who will spell that word?" Two of the boys and a little girl, named Emma, hold up the right hand, but do not speak. They hold up the right hand to show that they are ready to spell the word.

4. The school-mistress calls on Emma to say what let'ters and marks shall be put down on the blackboard to form the word attention.

for at," says Emma. "Shall

5. "Put down a, t, it be cap'i-tal A or small a?" asks the school-mistress. Re-mem'ber, it be-gins a sentence."

6. "Put down cap'i-tal A, small t, and a hy'phen," says Emma; "then put t, e, n, for ten, and put the mark of ac'cent after it; then put t, i, o, n, for tion; and all the letters will make the word At-ten'tion."

7. The school-mistress writes down the letters with a piece of chalk; and then asks the class if the word is spelled rightly. No one objects. She then says, "We do not al'ways use the hy'phen and mark of ac'cent in writing this and oth'er words of more than one syl'la-ble, do we?"

8. To this Emma re-plies: "We only use these marks now to show how the word may be di-vid'ed in spell'ing, and where, in pro-nounc'ing it, the ac'cent should be placed.

and

9. "These marks are used in dic'tion-a-ries spelling-books, and some-times in a reading-book like this; but they are not used much in com'mon books."

10. "The hyphen," says the school-mistress, "is used in com'mon books when the sylla-bles of a word are sep'a-ra-ted at the end of a line. The hy'phen is also used to join com'pound words, as arm-chair, candle-stick.

11. "Now I will put the word all after this word at-ten'tion. You can spell all, for it is a ver'y com'mon word. I have now com-plet'ed my sen'tence, and I wish some one to tell me what stop I shall put at the end.