she said, “tell me all about it, only remember that you must be careful, for I shall believe every word you say.” Thus encouraged, the innocent tale was told; investigation followed, and complete acquittal. My informant, herself to this day an eminently successful teacher, told me that she then learned the life-long lesson of treating children with a noble confidence.
It is impossible for a teacher to write about teaching without disclosing her own theories and revealing her own experience. The year after Margaret Fuller left Providence, we find her writing to her brother Arthur, then teaching a district school in Massachusetts; and never had young teacher a better counselor. She tells him, for instance (December 20, 1840), —
“The most important rule is, in all relations with our fellow-creatures, never forget that if they are imperfect persons they are immortal souls; and treat them as you would wish to be treated by the light of that thought.”
“Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved. As far as an amiable disposition and powers of entertainment make you so, it is a happiness, but if there is one grain of plausibility, it is a poison.”
This last maxim seems to me simply admirable; and she has an equally good passage in which she warns him against flattery, which, as she keenly points out, is even more injurious to children than to grown people. She adds: —
“For to the child, the parent or teacher is the representative of justice, and as that [i. e., the justice] of life
