his slow progress in learning to spell—­forgetting that in the English language there are in common, every-day use eight or ten thousand words, almost all of which are to be learned separately, by a bare and cheerless toil of committing to memory, with comparatively little definite help from the sound.  We have ourselves become so accustomed to seeing the word bear, for example, when denoting the animal, spelt b e a r, that we are very prone to imagine that there is something naturally appropriate in those letters and in that collocation of them, to represent that sound when used to denote that idea.  But what is there in the nature and power of the letters to aid the child in perceiving—­or, when told, in remembering—­whether, when referring to the animal, he is to write bear, or bare, or bair, or bayr, or bere, as in where.  So with the word you. It seems to us the most natural thing in the world to spell it y o u.  And when the little pupil, judging by the sound, writes it y u, we mortify him by our ridicule, as if he had done something in itself absurd.  But how is he to know, except by the hardest, most meaningless, and distasteful toil of the memory, whether he is to write you, or yu, or yoo, or ewe, or yew, or yue, as in flue, or even yo as in do, and to determine when and in what cases respectively he is to use those different forms?

The truth is, that each elementary sound that enters into the composition of words is represented in our language by so many different combinations of letters, in different cases, that the child has very little clue from the sound of a syllable to guide him in the spelling of it.  We ourselves, from long habit, have become so accustomed to what we call the right spelling—­which, of course, means nothing more than the customary one—­that we are apt to imagine, as has already been said, that there is some natural fitness in it; and a mode of representing the same sound, which in one case seems natural and proper, in another appears ludicrous and absurd.  We smile to see laugh spelled larf, just as we should to see scarf spelled scaugh, or scalf, as in half; and we forget that this perception of apparent incongruity is entirely the result of long habit in us, and has no natural foundation, and that children can not be sensible of it, or have any idea of it whatever.  They learn, in learning to talk, what sound serves as the name by which the drops of water that they find upon the grass in the morning is denoted, but they can have no clue whatever to guide them in determining which of the various modes by which precisely that sound is represented in different words, as dew, do, due, du, doo, and dou, is to be employed in this case, and they become involved in hopeless perplexity if they attempt to imagine “how