do at the outset. What we want to do first is to write. Then after a while we shall find that the expression of thought has grown comparatively so easy that we can devote nearly all our time and energy to the thought itself. Therefore do not seek too far for material. Be satisfied for the present with home-topics and homethoughts. You are thinking about something perhaps every waking moment of your life. You talk fast enough too when you are among your companions, and without even a thought of its difficulty. It ought to be almost as easy to write; and it is. You will find it so if you only write as you think and same subjects and treating them in much the same way. And you will find too that writing, far from being a task, is a real pleasure.

talk, taking the

Is it something new that you want? The chances are just as good that you will find it right at home as elsewhere. A thousand aspiring, or, it may be, driven and desperate, young essayists have written upon the genius of Napoleon and the pleasures of hope and the blessings of civilization; but ten to one nobody has ever yet written about your grandfather's barn with all its denizens from the calves in the basement to the pigeons in the roof, with its pulley-fork and grain chutes, its harness room and machinery sheds, and the inexhaustible resources for fun in its spacious carriage room and haymow on a rainy day. The loving and truthful touches which you are sure to give to descriptions of this character will be worth more than all the artificial glamor your fancy may throw over "cloudcapped towers and gorgeous palaces."

You have made a mistake at times, perhaps, in im

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agining that what was new to you would be new to others. But you make a greater mistake in taking it for granted that what is old and familiar to you will be so to everybody else. You walk through the streets of your native town or city and find it all too commonplace to furnish you a fitting theme. But you travel to a foreign country and visit its metropolis for the first time. Here everything is novel, from the paving of the streets to the architecture of the public buildings, from the signs over the shop-doors to the dress and manners of the clerk behind the counter. You are inspired to record your impressions and you fill your journal with graphic descriptions, and write long letters home. would like to tell all the world of what you have seen and heard. But you fail to realize that there are thousands who have spent their lives in this city and who find no more inspiration here than you found in your native place. They would not be half so much interested in what you might write about it as in what you might write about your home. Realize this once and you go back with a sense of the rarity and importance of what you had all along called commonplace. Here at home you may not be able to write with quite the same keenness of interest, but you can make up for this by fidelity and sympathy. And once you fully feel that what is best known to yourself is least known to nearly everybody else, your interest will be aroused where it was never aroused before.

Again; are you quite sure there is not something new, even for you, in these old familiar scenes? We allow things to grow old to us too soon in this world. Resolve every morning as you take your accustomed

route to school that you will see something new something that you have not noticed before though it may have been there a long time. Rest assured you can find such things every day. And when looking for them has grown a habit, you will find yourself living as it were in another and most wonderful world. You want a subject for an essay; take "The Street I Live In." Make a drawing of it first, what the surveyor calls a plot or plan. Locate the houses, the fences and gates, the walks, the trees. You will soon find it necessary to take a walk through the street in order to verify your plan; and before you are through you will conclude that you did not know half so much about your street as you thought you did. So it is with everything. We shall find here, to be sure, a great difference in individuals. Some of us are naturally quick and accurate observers and calculators, others are not. Experiment on yourself. Try to recall the patterns of the carpets or rugs at home, the color of the paper on the wall of your bed-room. Can you give the dimensions of the room you are now occupying? the number of square rods or acres in your play-ground? the number of paces from the gate to the corner? Some of you will find that you can do these things with ease. Others of you will be surprised to find that you do not know positively whether your dearest friend's eyes are brown or blue, and whether Mr. So-and-So, whom you see every day, wears a moustache or not. It is truly astonishing to consider how little we see with our eyes open all the time.

There is another consideration. Nobody else ever heard with your ears or saw with your eyes. Might it

not be that, if you could look through another's eyes you would find the color of the grass to be, not green, but what you have always called blue? In other words, is it not possible that grass makes the same impression on another's optic nerves that the sky makes on yours, and that the sky makes a yet different impression on his? Of course we agree in calling the impression received from the same thing by the same name, and so there is no confusion. But who shall say whether these things are or are not thus? Perhaps we are living in very different worlds all the time and have never suspected it. Certain it is that some people are what we call color blind and have great difficulty in recognizing and distinguishing very pronounced and diverse colors. Certain it is, too, that if we could borrow our neighbor's eyes and ears we should see tints that we never saw before and hear sounds and harmonies that we never heard. If we but had the dog's keen sense of smell a practically new field of knowledge would be opened up

to us.

Beyond a doubt these individual and race differences exist. Therefore take these into account and write with the conviction that you have something new to say about the most commonplace objects in the world, because your senses have told you a different story about them from what ours have told each one of us.

Of course all this is not the art of writing. Merely an attempt is here made to give you a few hints upon the secret of finding material, so that you will never need to hesitate again for a subject. How to work this material into literature is another problem.

SECTION 1.-NARRATION.

EXERCISE I.

INCIDENT.

The most of us find it easier to tell what a man does than to tell how he looks. It may seem strange that this should be so when we consider that a man's actions are continually varying while his appearance remains practically the same and gives plenty of opportunity for study. But it is so, none the less, as your own experience will soon show. We can tell a story readily enough as long as we are dealing with actions and events, but if it becomes necessary to describe the scenes or characters, we hesitate as before a difficult problem. We shall not stop now to inquire into the reason of this. Suffice it to note that we are usually more interested in actions and events than in mere objects or scenes. There is about the former an element of uncertainty and surprise; we seldom know just what to expect next and our attention is therefore kept on the alert. And whatever we are interested in witnessing we are likewise interested in hearing or telling about. Here then let us begin.

Select from your past experience any incident that had for the time being an interest of its own, no matter how trivial. Be assured that anything which