absolute needs of the child. "Hic labor, hoc opus est."

And for you, who send your six-year-olds to school with a single book,
and grumble because you have to buy even so much of an outfit, what are
you going to do about it when your boy drains all the life out of the
little volume, in a couple of weeks or a month? He knows the stories
by heart, and after that says them over, day by day, because he must,
and not in the least because he cares to.

What are you going to do about this? It is largely your business. You
cannot shirk it and say that you send the boy to school, and it is the
teacher's business to take care of him. That will not answer the
question. Look the facts in the face, and then do as well by your boy
as you do by your hogs! When they get cloyed on corn, then you change
their feed, and so keep them growing, even if it does cost twice as
much to make the change; and yet, the chances are that when your boy is
tired to death of the old, old stories in his reader, tales worn
threadbare, as they are drawled over and over in his hearing by the
dullards of his class, till his soul is sick of them, even then you
force him to go again and again over the hated pages, till he will
resort to rank rebellion to be rid of them!

And what are you going to do about it?

Miss Stone knew none of these things. They were of little interest to
her, and she bothered her head but little about them. But they were of
interest to "Dodd" Weaver. In the evolution of this young hopeful they
played an important part. They were hindrances to the boy at the very
outset of his course in the public schools. They begot in him habits
and dislikes which it took years to efface, and from which it is