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46 be applied. I knew a little boy, very dull at his letters, yet very quick to make observations upon cause and effect, who, long before he could speak plainly, walked one day beside his mother in perfect silence, looking earnestly at her feet. At last he said, in his broken language, "One foot goes, while tudder foot stops." Here then was an opportunity for the mother to give her boy a lesson of far more value than many pages in a book of spelling, or of reading made easy. She might, and she possibly did, set him to raise his weight from the ground by lifting both feet at once; and at the same time she might explain to him in a manner which he never would forget, the meaning and application of the words step, walk, run, jump, with many others, which he would have been months in learning as a common lesson.

To the observation of the boy upon his mother's feet, that one stopped while the other went on, a nurse-maid would in all probability have replied—"To be sure it does: what a silly boy you are!" and here would have been an end of the matter. The general incapacity of servants to convey useful information with regard to common things, makes it sometimes a subject of astonishment, that mothers should so seldom walk out with their children; because it is chiefly in their walks that their attention is struck by new objects, and their curiosity in consequence awakened. Even where the attendance of a governess is substituted for that of a nurse, the case is not always much better; because none but a mother can love a child well enough to be always teaching it. The governess, of course, will have stipulated that when school-hours are over, she shall have nothing more to do in the way of instruction: and even if it be agreed upon, that she shall walk out with the children, who shall assert a right to deprive her of almost the only luxury permitted to a governess—the luxury of her own thoughts? Thus, while the child is asking whether the same butterflies will come again next spring, she is probably thinking of a letter she has received that morning, telling her that the vessel in which her brother sailed has been lost at sea.

Above all other means of instruction, that of easy and familiar conversation is the most effectual in the general tone it gives to the habits of thinking, observing, and