some words which I foresee will cause difficulty, I place such on the
blackboard and rapidly pronounce and explain them before the reading.
Generally, however, I find the text the best interpreter of its words.
What follows explains what goes before, if the child is led to read on
to the end of the sentence. It is a mistake to allow children to be
frightened away from choice reading by an occasional hard word. There
is no better time than his reading lesson in which to teach a child
that the hard things of life are to be grappled with and overcome.
A mistake also, I think, is that toilsome process of explanation which
I sometimes find teachers following, under the impression that it will
be "parrot work" (as the stock phrase of the "institutes" has it) for
the pupils to read anything which they do not clearly and fully
comprehend. Teachers' definitions, in such cases, I have often
noticed, are no better than dictionary definitions, and surely
everybody knows that few more fruitless things than dictionary
definitions are ever crammed into the memory of a child. Better far
give free play to the native intelligence of the child, and trust it to
apprehend, though it may not yet comprehend nor be able to express its
apprehension in definition. On this subject I am glad to quote so high
an authority as Sir Walter Scott: "Indeed I rather suspect that
children derive impulses of a powerful and important kind from reading
things which they do not comprehend, and therefore that to write down
to children's understanding is a mistake. Set them on the scent and
let them puzzle it out."

>From time to time I have allowed my pupils to give me written reports
from memory of these essays, and have often found these little
compositions sparkling with pleasing information, or full of that
childlike fun which is characteristic of the author. I have marked
the errors in these exercises, and have given them back to the children