=Power of understanding.=—­When she reads “Little Boy Blue” she can hear the sobbing of a heartbroken mother and thus, vicariously, comes to know the universality of death and sorrow.  But she finds faith and hope in the poem, also, and so can see the sunlight suffusing the clouds of the mother’s grief.  Thus she enters into the feeling of motherhood and so shares the life of all the mothers whose children are her pupils.  In every page she reads she crosses anew the threshold of life and gains a knowledge of its joys, its sorrows, its triumphs, or its defeats.  In short, she reads with the spirit and not merely with the mind, and thus catches the spiritual meaning of what she reads.  She can feel as well as think and so can emotionalize the printed page.  Nature has endowed her with a sensory foundation that reacts to the emotional situations that the author produces.  Thus she understands, and that is the prime desideratum in reading.  And because she understands, she can interpret, and cause her pupils to understand.  Thus they receive another endowment of life.

=Books as exponents of life.=—­She has time for reading as she has time for eating and drinking, and for the same reason.  To her they are all cooerdinate elements of life.  She eats, and sleeps, and reads because she is alive; and she is more alive because she eats, and sleeps, and reads.  She taps the sources of spiritual refreshment, without parade, and rejoices in the consequent enrichment of her life.  She does not smite the rock, but speaks to it, and smiles upon it, and the waters gush forth.  She descends into Hades with Dante, and ascends Sinai with Moses, and is refreshed and strengthened by her journeys.  She sits enrapt as Shakespeare turns the kaleidoscope of life for her, or stands enthralled by Victor Hugo’s picture of the human soul.  Her sentient spirit is ignited by the fires of genius that glow between the covers of the book, and her fine enthusiasm carries the divine conflagration over into the spirits of her pupils.  There is, therefore, no drag or listlessness in her class in reading, because, during this exercise, life is as buoyant and spontaneous as it is upon the playground.

=The meaning of history.=—­In her teaching of history she invests all the characters with life, because to her they are alive.  And because they are alive to her they are alive to her pupils.  They are instinct with power, action, life.  She rehabilitates the scenes in which they moved, and, therefore, they must be alive in order to perform their parts.  They are all flesh and blood people with all the attributes of people.  They are all actuated by motives and move along their appointed ways obedient to the laws of cause and effect.  They are not named in the book to be learned and recited, but to be known.  She causes her pupils to know them as they would come to know people in her home.  Nor do they ever mistake one for the other or confuse their actions.  They know them too well for that.  These characters are made to stand wide apart, so that, being thus seen, they will ever after be known.  History is not a directory of names, but groups of people going about their tasks.  They hunger, and thirst, and love, and hate, and struggle with their environment as their descendants are doing to-day.