Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/238

224 mountains, but we said that it was an impersonal proposition, and we saw very clearly that the pupils kept silent simply from politeness, but that they understood perfectly well that our answer was far more stupid than theirs; and in this respect we were secretly in perfect agreement.

Having persuaded ourselves of the uselessness of syntactical analysis, we also tried etymological analysis—the parts of speech, declensions, conjugations; and in the same way they proposed conundrums to one another about the dative case, the infinitive mood, and adverbs, and it resulted in the same ennui, the same abuse of the authority exerted by us, and the same lack of attention.

In the older class they always use the letter Ѣ in the dative and prepositional cases, but when they correct the younger ones in this respect they can never give the reason why, and they are obliged to fall back on enigmas of cases in order to remember the rule: "The dative takes a Ѣ."

Even the little ones, who have as yet heard nothing about the parts of speech, very often cry out the right letter to indicate the dative, though they themselves do not know why, and evidently take delight in the fact that they have guessed it.

In the last few weeks I experimented with the second class with an exercise of my own invention; and I like all inventors was charmed with it, and it seemed to me extraordinarily convenient and rational until I became convinced of its inefficacy in actual use. Not naming the parts of speech in a sentence, I made the scholars write something down, sometimes giving them a subject—that is, a proposition; and by means of questions I tried to make them amplify the proposition by introducing adjectives, new subjects, qualifying clauses, relatives, and complementary attributes.

"Wolves run."

"When?"—"Where?"—"How?"—"What wolves run?"—"What are running?"—"They run and what else do they do?" It seemed to me that in getting