Men wonder sometimes how they can expend a modest sum of money to good purpose in giving pleasure and profit to others. Get some pictures of good faces, and flowers, and landscapes, and other proper subjects, and put them upon the walls of your nearest school-house, or of some other in which you may be interested. When you have done this for one school you may want to do it for a second, or you will suggest to some other generous heart the like gift of enduring value. What chance have boys and girls with a dead-alive teacher in a school-house whose blank walls are eloquent of poverty? Oh, the weariness of it!
Real, genuine, helpful, beautiful art is now brought within reach of the million. The arts of chromo-lithography and half-tone engraving are putting exquisite pictures, at low cost, wherever there is taste to appreciate and enjoy them. In our homes they are everywhere. Why not everywhere also upon schoolroom walls bare of these choice educational influences? To many a child good pictures come like the ministrations of the angels. We feel this, we know it; and for the years remaining to us shall do what we can to make school-life better for the pictures on the wall.
"Oh, mother, I lay A-dreaming one day By the wreck of the Alberdeen, And I heard a singing Under the sea Of children swinging-- Their hair was green!-- In seaweed swings, and they called to me-- Oh, mother, they called to me"--
"Hush, hush thee, my child! Thy prattle is wild, For the children that dwell in the sea Are the fishes swimming Amid white shells Whose pearly hymning But echoed to thee The strangled songs of the sinking swells-- My child, 'twas the song of the swells."
"And, mother," they said "Come to us!--oh, dread Not the waves tho' they fret and foam; They're far, far over Us while we play Beneath the cover Of our sea-home, All day, all day o'er the beds of the bay! Oh, mother, the beds of the bay!"
"Hush, hush thee, my child!"-- But strangely he smiled As he gazed at the weird-lit waves. For he heard a singing-- "Come to us, come!" He saw them swinging In crystal caves, And cried, "I'm coming! I'm"--ah, how numb His death-dewy lips--how numb!
At the Shaw banquet in St. Louis the subject for the evening was "Horticultural Education," and a good deal was said as to the introduction of the study in the public schools.