"Come with me to the open country and let us live together for awhile. There we will be silent and look into the hearts of children as we do into the heart of nature.

"When we come back the school will be as a new world and you will work with the earnestness of a discoverer patiently awaiting revelations." Later, PATRI tells of a school offered him and his introduction to it;

......

...When I saw the assembly a few minutes later I agreed with him. I did not want to be there.

"I sat on the platform while the principal conducted the exercises. There was scarcely a child in the room who was not either talking or chewing gum, or slouching in his seat. There was a spirit of unrest thruout the monotonous assembly. There was nothing about the general exercises that could offer the slightest inspiration to either children or teacher. Two or three of the men walked up and down the room eyeing the boys, and the women, each at her place, had their eyes riveted on their classes. "Yet, in spite of all this close supervision, the children were not behaving as if they were happy or as if they liked school. At the end of fifteen minutes they were sent to their rooms and the work of the day began. What work that was no one could appreciate unless he had gone thru the halls of the building and felt the struggle that was going on in each room. The very walls seemed to speak of tension and battle.

"The antagonism between the chil

The

dren and teachers was far stronger than I had ever seen it before. antagonism between the school and the neighborhood was intense. Both came from mutual distrust founded on mutual misunderstanding. The children were afraid of the teachers, and the teachers feared the children.

"The neighborhood was a place from which the teacher escaped, and into which the children burrowed. One never knew as he went thru the streets what missile or epithet might greet him. One or the other was certain."

On the other hand, a reviewer ought to be honest with his readers. We had hoped to give unqualified praise to this book with its remarkable beginning; but we cannot give the same meed of praise to the last hundred pages as to the first. The author has told his story, and the later narrative seems to get nowhere in particular. Perhaps it is our fault and we do not understand the rest. It reminds us of a book often rated as one of six leading American novels and the most famous of them all. Yet, to one independent of traditions and free from awe of established dicta, the first and last parts of that book are so unequal that it becomes almost a curiosity rather than a masterpiece. We have long awaited, but so far in vain, for an abler man to take up and discuss those differences, inequalities that appear in the most noted work of fiction with which any American author is credited up to the present time.

MANY

ANY of the letters I receive from mothers show that they are intensely interested in telling stories to the children. Some mothers ask for books containing the stories we believe in. Others ask how they may study to tell them to the children. MISS STOCKARD, the story-telling head of the training in this field in the Normal School at Washington, D. C., and of whom I have told you before, writes me to tell you that there are two requisites for success in storytelling. To know the child and to know good literature. The richer the background of literature the better the result attained thru the story. The more your life has been enriched by beautiful experiences and beautiful thought, the more you will have to give thru your story. There is nowhere that the power of personality is more felt than in the telling of a story. Whatever you are, whatever you have thought, felt, or done, colors and transforms and interprets the story. It is like light passing thru a stainedglass window. The mother who tells a story to her child is giving to him her deepest soul-force in a most subtle way. All unconscious even to herself she is revealing to him her understanding of the deep, fine things of life and her understanding of him as well. So it inevitably comes about that a bond of sympathy, of trust, of good fellowship is established between the two that the stress and separation

of after years can never break down. So many mothers say, "I can't tell stories. Besides I don't know any."

Well, you can tell them and you should learn them. To read them is not the same. The book and the words are between you and your child. You can never give yourself in the same way thru reading print as when you let your own appreciation of the story speak thru your voice and eyes straight to your child. Absorb your story. Make a part of yourself all its beauty, and its message. Then free yourself from mere words. See the pictures and reveal them to your listening child A book on storytelling by MISS STOCKARD, will soon be published and due notice of it will be given in this department, in order to help teachers find the help this book will surely give. D. J. BENJ. EISENWEIN the well-known shortstory authority, is responsible for the publication of this forthcoming book.

As for knowing stories, learn them. If you can't find them for yourself, besiege the editors of your magazines and newspapers for them until you are supplied. Insist on having the best. There are no stories so good as the old, old ones which sprang from the heart of the race in ages past. These old tales meet the child's need because they correspond to his stage of development. They were primitive man's effort to explain himself, nature and God. The child will recognize his

kinship to them. He will find in them the great Truths which answer his own wonder and longings.

SARAH LOUISE ARNOLD says, "Life shows us that the stories which are heard at the mother's knees are an essential part of our heritage. The child who is deprived of this possession will always miss the charm of literature, the joy of poetry, the swift imagination which enables us to share in that which is foreign to our intimate experience. Except as this appreciation is assured in childhood, it is never won."

Aside from the literary and artistic value of stories there is no greater force than they for the preservation of the purity of a child. Fill his mind with their rich imagery, their stirring deeds, their ideals, set his fancy going about the mysteries of nature, let him follow the adventures of great heroes and there will be little room left in his life for sordid or evil things. The best way to banish darkness is to let in the light. To tell stories to children is your duty and your privilege.

beautiful work is viewed. Everything has a human look about it— it was made with human hands that a few moments before, maybe, were handling the plow or tending the baby.

The bed spreads are especially interesting. A heavy linen was used in some instances upon which in brilliant colors a completed design was worked in a big free way. The little boxes of exquisite birch wood, with the grain brought out with the minimum of finish, gave one a revelation of what is possible when the material of a craft is used in a simple way.

Teachers of craft can learn much from the study of peasant craft, because here is craft work full of art and yet in a simple stage of technical development. Much craft work in schools, if allowed to develop naturally, would be a kind of peasant or folk craft, with ideas and motives expressed in the simplest way possible.

Business is the last thing to reflect the growing desires of the people. So it is remarkable that this conservative force in our every-day life is now sensing the need that folk craft answers. The Allied Home Furnishing Industries, consisting of representatives of furniture manufacturers, has just been organized to conduct a campaign thruout the country for more beautiful and better made home furnishings. Manufacturers of not only furniture but rugs, wall-paper, upholstery fabrics, pottery, are concerned in this movement. Here may be the answer to the question disgusted householders have often asked, "why are not beautiful household furnishings manufactured instead of ugly ones.' An article made in a factory cannot indeed have the same

charm and intimate beauty that a folk craft object made by a worker interested in every detail of its production, yet as we must all buy factory made furniture, hangings, rugs and so forth, let us encourage the efforts of such manufacturers who are thus trying to put art into every day life.

Folk craft may be quickly defined as the art expression of persons not professionally artists. An illustration of this democratic art in a field far removed from what is ordinarily thought of as folk craft is brought out in a delightful book I have just been reading called "The Architecture of Colonial America" by Harold Donaldson Eberlein, (Little, Brown and Company). In the true Colonial architecture which the author defines as all the architectual expression produced up to the advent of the stately Georgian style with its classic embellishment of doors and windows, stairways and fireplaces, the plan and scheme of decoration was largely the work of the owner and workmen. For in those days the architect had not yet arrived on the scene and part of an educated man's intellectual equipment was a knowledge of architecture. Then, too, the craft of the master carpenter and stonemason included much of a sense of design and proportion now, unhappily, left to the architect alone. We, of course, need the architect, but we need also some of that old-time craftmanship of the carpenter and mason which included good work and an intelligent taste. And we need in our education the emphasis upon the spirit of craft so that when we wish to have a house built we may discern the beauty in the suggestions of the architect and may

also clothe with grace our own architectural or decorative ideas for the home.

MISS NINA PREY, of Zephyrhills, Florida, well-known in Porto Rico as a true crafter, has established the Zephyr Hills Art Craft Shop. and writes to us as follows:

"Perhaps you will give us an order for a dozen gift baskets, handmade of Florida pine needles, sewed with your choice of colored crochet cotton and filled with the finest, crystalized grapefruit or orange peel that you ever tasted, or possibly you will prefer to order a dozen handkerchiefs, hemstitched by hand, and with a handwoven lace border. Our marmalades are extra fine and as we ship them in waxed paper containers, they reach you in good shape. If you are in search of a real novelty, try one of our hats crocheted from the fine threads growing between the folds of the palmetto leaf."

ISABEL MILLION, writes from Knoxville, Tenn., about her "apple-face" dolls which were extensively noticed a short time ago in the N. Y. Tribune Institute section. She says that about five years ago, one rainy Sunday, she noticed the resemblance of a withered apple to an old person's cheek and that gave her the idea to make the dolls. The first were very crude, and the greatest drawback was from the apple decaying so rapidly but finally she discovered a method to preserve them and now her success is assured. The dolls are six and eight inches high and dressed in bright calico such as mountain people use: and they carry shuck baskets, and umbrellas. The mountaineer dolls are the only type MISS MILLION is making now as her patrons prefer them. Her address

is 918 Henderson St. The dolls cost $2.50 a figure. The Tribune page of

illustrations of these figures appeared on April 15, 1917.

A

BOOK of drills for using the

Model-Store to advantage has been sent to every single school that has received Model-Store equipment. It will pay every teacher in a school that has the equipment to look over that book. The book should be kept with the store material so that each teacher can have the book when using the store. The receipt of the book has not as yet been acknowledged by some of the schools, and we trust that if there have been any failures of the post office to effect deliveries the teachers will advise us at once so they can have the book on hand the day school opens.

In previous seasons some schools said that the store was not used to advantage until after the classes had been organized and had actually gotten down to grade work. In others the great value of the store during the first few days of the term was grasped and utilized. With the Drill Book as a guide every teacher can get this benefit.

Turning to the index in the front of the book one or more drills will be found suggested for every step in arithmetic, and as the prime use of

the store is to make the underlying principle of each new step in arithmetic clearer to the pupil than it could be made in the same time by abstract methods, the time to use the store is at the beginning of each subject and hence at the very beginning of the term.

Where the necessities of organizing the classes delay practical work the store will be found a means of bridging the gap and starting effective teaching with the first tap of the bell after vacation.

Vacation is playtime and both teachers and pupils often find it hard to get back into the routine of school work. Frequently the pupils are found to have almost forgotten the previous year's work which must be used as a foundation during the coming term, and their memory is restored only as the various problems arise.

The Model-Store is the greatest arouser of memory that has ever been put in the schoolroom. With the play spirit still upon them after the long Summer days both teachers and pupils find the store a combination of play and work which makes the transition easier and serves to remind