concentration by promising that I would tell a story for a few minutes
at the end of school, if a bit of work had been satisfactorily
mastered. It certainly produced a lot of cheerful effort; my story was
simple enough, description as brief and vivid as I could make it, and
brisk tangible incidents. But the silence, the luxurious abandonment
of small minds to an older and more pictorial imagination, the dancing
light in open eyes, did really give me for once a sense of power which
I never had in teaching Latin Prose or the Greek conditional sentence.
I always told stories for an hour on Sunday evenings to the boys in my
house, and though few of my intellectual and ethical counsels are
remembered by old pupils, I never met one who did pot recollect the
stories.

Now we have here, I believe, a source of intellectual pleasure which
is consistently neglected and even despised. It is regarded as a mere
luxury; but we do not make the mistake of substituting gymnastics for
games, and removing the pleasure of personal performance. Why can we
not also do something to encourage what old Hawtrey used so
beautifully to call "the sweet pride of authorship"? The worst of it
all is that we look so much to tangible results. I do not mean that we
must try to develop Shakespeares, Shelleys, Thackerays; such airy
creatures have a way of catering for themselves! I do riot at all want
to turn out a generation of third-rate writing amateurs. But many boys
have a distinct pleasure not only in listening to imaginations, and
riding like the beetle on the engine, but in evoking and realising
some little vision and creation of their own brains. Of course there
are boys to whom mental activity is all of the nature of a cross laid
upon them for some purpose, wise or unwise. But there are also a good
many shy boys, who will not venture to make themselves conspicuous by
literary and imaginative feats, and who yet if it were a matter of