Alpena Weekly Argus

One would probably get sick of a single diet after a while but certainly the physical stomach not sooner than the mental. The mind demands for its food something better than the dry bones of mathematics. The problems of life are not all figures and algebraic equations.

When one meets his family at the close of the day he doesn't talk on long division nor cipher out future happiness by the rule of three.

When he talks to his family or his friends, he uses, or certainly ought to use, grammar. When he reads in his paper about the capitulation of Adrianople, he doesn't locate by alligation. He who does not know grammar, either from books or imbibed with his mother tongue, is compelled to feel his weakness every time he takes his pen to write, and to exhibit it almost every time he opens his mouth to speak.

Every day, indeed almost every waking hour of one's life, language is on the tongue; that language too whose purity it is duty to preserve, and concerning which Shakespeare sighed because that little isle imprisoned all its sweetness.

Its substance, if not its sweetness, is now found in almost every nook and corner of the great globe, and he who does not wish to learn to speak it in its purity nor to write it correctly does not wish for a vast amount of treasure which the world holds in an open hand.

Everybody gets tired of studying one thing after a while. Even grown folks would rather be excused from a three months diet of fractions. A fellow once said to his hostess, "Yes, I like liver for seventy or eighty meals, but for a steady thing it gets monotonous after a while."

It is just so with arithmetic. It is an important study, next to the most important, and not to be in any way underrated, but no scholar who has life enough to make it worth his while to live can study arithmetic alone and keep out of mischief.

The great majority of the faculties of the mind will have nothing to do with figures and they will not sleep all day and any attempt to compel them to do so will prove both fruitless and harmful. Idleness and mischief are in close communion with all such one-sided mental activity.

This must be so. The mind, and especially the youthful mind, is so constituted by nature that after studying a certain subject for a time, those faculties employed must rest. As soon as those faculties, not the whole mind, become weary, they refuse to work. It is useless to compel them. The effort will be mere dawdling. Other faculties are fresh; they should be put to work, and when these are weary, still use others in their stead.

It is quite a common thing for notes, something like the following, to be received at school: "Please excuse John from studying grammar and geography. I want him to put his time on arithmetic."

It is no doubt safe to assume that in a large majority of cases these notes are dictated by the pupils themselves, or are obtained by their earnest solicitations. Not a girl in all our schools this year has presented a single request of that sort. Nearly all were presented by the largest boys in school, boys too, who have the ability to do much more than their younger classmates, if they only had the will.

The intention is sometimes, perhaps, usually honest enough, but any hope of parents built on such a foundation will be pretty certain to be met by disappointment.

In the yard of the Central building, there is a grove of balm of Gilead trees, which contains nineteen trees in nine straight rows with five trees in each row, and, strange to say, though they have been planted nearly two years, and in a rather barren soil, and have had to stand in that puzzling figure, not one of them has died.

"Mamma, where do all the cows get the milk from?" asked Willie, looking up from the flowing pan of milk which he had been intently regarding.

"Where do you get your tears from?" was the answer.

After a thoughtful silence he again broke out: "Mamma, do the cows have to be cranked in?"