with them through the winter months. In the spring I should have money enough to pay my expenses for the remainder of the year, accepting from my mother only the home I should have so deeply grieved her by refusing. Thus my plans were fully formed, and lest I should incur the refusal of my guardians, I secured a school before naming my purposes to them. I was met, as I expected, by the strongest opposition from my mother; but Mr. James, on the contrary, seemed much pleased.

'My boy, you delight me," he cried, wringing my hands. "Smithson was right—you've good stuff in you; and you'll be a success yet, which I'm by no means sure would have been the case if my friend Gurdon had not made ducks and drakes of his property. And your mother will do better by and by, and so will Emma, never fear. It is the right spirit you all show, and I like you for it. And listen, my dear boy. It is well to make teaching the means of helping you through college, but let it be something more. It is almost the highest vocation to which a man may aspire. There is hardly another so important, or so responsible. Don't teach school merely to make money, but remember how much will be committed to your trust; and let your time and talents be used for the benefit of others, as well as yourself."

I had thought of the subject in this light before, and it was easy for me to promise. It was a remote country district to which I was going, where only the veriest rudiments of education from books were demanded—at least the committee had so informed me; but still I felt that I should find an important work to do, and much would be demanded of me by One to whom in this first employment of my talents I was far more responsible than to my human employers.

It was a cold, dark, and peculiarly chill and cheerless evening in the latter part of November, when, having conquered, if not removed, all scruples on the part of my mother and sister, I arrived, after two days' slow traveling over miry roads, at the scene of my new labors.

The driver had somehow learned that I was the new teacher, and he pointed out to me, as we passed, the school-house, an ancient brown frame building of one story, with a tumble-down and desolate appearance. No trees stood near it, and the fence was half pulled down, while the ground around was either encumbered by the chips left from the chopping of last year's fire-wood or else trodden hard by the feet of more than one genera

tion of children.

My heart sank within me, and did not rebound to cheerfulness when, a few moments later, the driver pulled up suddenly at a dilapidated gray stone house.

"Deacon Lawrence lives here," he said, "and you'll board with him the first week, so they told me to leave you here."

In another moment I stood in the hall of my temporary home, the description of which, with its inhabitants, I leave to another chapter.

January, 1866.

EMINENT EDUCATORS DECEASED IN 1865.

WITH the opening of the new year, it is a wise custom to look back

upon the year that has passed, and note what it has taken from

us, and what it has left. The doom of death resting on all, we can not suppose that the rolling months should have passed without taking from our profession some of its loved and honored members. The mortality among teachers in 1865 was not, however, so great as it was in 1864a year which was remarkable among those of the past half-century, for the extraordinary number of eminent instructors who passed away within its cycle.

Among those whose demise in 1865 we mourn, the most prominent was the statesman and scholar, EDWARD EVERETT, whose connection with educational matters began early, and was continued through nearly the whole of his life of threescore years and ten. As professor in Harvard University at the age of twenty-five; as the president of that venerable institution at a later period; as the eminent friend and advocate of public schools, and the promoter of every measure for their improvement; as one of the founders and most liberal donors to the City Public Library of Boston, Mr. Everett is deserving a high place among the educators of the country. He died on the 15th of January.

SIDNEY A. THOMAS, of New Haven, who died on the 5th of February, was one of the ablest teachers in Connecticut. Thorough, patient, and painstaking, and always keeping pace with the real progress of the age, his school had maintained, for thirty years or more, a high reputation. His school-books were admirable. He was one of the first teachers in New England to introduce the military dress and drill into his school; and at the opening of the war, numbers of his pupils were employed by the State and the General Government in drilling the companies and regi ments of volunteers, before they left for the seat of war.

Rev. R. O. KELLOGG, a clergyman and professor in Lawrence University, Wisconsin, a man of fine abilities, and a skillful instructor, took his own life in a paroxysm of insanity in February.

On the 8th of April, Rev. SAMUEL AARON, a Baptist clergyman, a pro

found scholar, and one of the most successful teachers in New Jersey for nearly thirty years, passed away. We may give a brief sketch of his labors in a future number of the MONTHLY.

Miss ELIZABETH ORAM, a name familiar to many New Yorkers, for forty years or more, died on the 8th of May. She enjoyed a high reputation ast a teacher, and as the author of some excellent text-books; and while her little eccentricities occasionally provoked a smile, there are many who will acknowledge their obligations to her for careful and thorough training.

HENRY MCMURTRIE, M. D., Professor of Physiology and Hygiene in the Philadelphia High School, was an able and successful instructor, who invested with rare interest a study often pronounced dry by teachers and scholars. He was also the author of some text-books. His death occurred May 26th.

The educational profession, as well as the literary world, experienced a great loss, on the 10th of June, in the death of Mrs. LYDIA HUNTLEY SIGOURNEY, widely known as one of our sweetest lyric poets. In early life, for a period of ten or twelve years, she was a successful teacher, a part of the time at the head of an excellent female seminary at Hartford, Connecticut, and in all her subsequent life, she never forgot her connection with the teacher's profession. One of her most charming prose works is her "Letters to My Pupils." She was in the habit of meeting with the pupils of the female seminaries, and encouraging them in their progress as students. The Hartford Public High School was largely indebted to her able and vigorous advocacy for its successful inception and subsequent growth. No teachers' convention, or other educational movement, in the city, which had been her home for fifty years, would have been deemed a success, If it had failed to elicit her warm and hearty sympathy and cooperation. The instruction of the deaf mute, the blind, the idiotic, and the convicts of the state-prison, and the organization of schools and courses of lectures in the hospitals for the insane, were among her schemes for doing good.

The Right Reverend ALONZO POTTER, D. D., Bishop of the Diocese of Pennsylvania, whose death took place at San Francisco, on the 4th of July, had long been known as one of the most devoted friends of popular education, as well as one of the most accomplished teachers in the United States. We purpose giving, in a coming number of the MONTHLY, some account of his eminent services in the cause of education.

Rev. DUNCAN R. CAMPBELL, D. D., a Baptist clergyman, and for seventeen or eighteen years President of Georgetown College, Kentucky, died on the

11th of August. A native of Scotland, and a graduate, we believe, of the University of Edinburgh, he had brought to his work as an instructor, profound scholarship, great tact and discrimination, and a thorough knowledge of human nature. The college had prospered under his presidency.

Of Rev. FRANCIS WAYLAND, D. D., LL. D., late President of Brown University, whose death occurred on the 30th of September, we shall speak at length in the next number of the MONTHLY. We regard his death as the greatest loss which the cause of education in the United States has suffered during the past year.

Rev. SAMUEL K. TALMAGE, D. D., a Presbyterian clergyman, and President of Oglethorpe University, Midway, Georgia, was a man of decided ability, and the author of several interesting works,-none of them, however, we believe, on 'educational topics. His death occurred on the 2d of October.

JAMES S. EATON, long the Principal of the English department of Phillips' Academy, Andover, and in high repute as a fine belles-lettres scholar, died on the 10th of October; and on the same day, Mrs. ELIZABETH RICORD, once a popular teacher, and the author of an excellent treatise on mental philosophy, as well as of other text-books, died at Newark, New Jersey, at the venerable age of seventy-eight years.

Rev. GEORGE MUSGRAVE GIGER, D. D., a Presbyterian clergyman, late Professor of Latin in New Jersey College at Princeton, an accomplished scholar, died on the 11th of October, at the age of forty-three years.

Rev. J. HOLMES AGNEW, D. D., a Presbyterian clergyman, whose life had been almost equally divided between the teacher's and editor's profession, died at Peekskill, New York, on the 19th of October, at the age of sixty-one years. He had been, for a number of years, at the head of the Pittsfield (Massachusetts) Female Seminary, a school of very high character; had edited, for some years, the Eclectic Magazine, and had recently taken charge of the American Fœderal Monthly.

JOSEPH EMERSON WORCESTER, LL. D., teacher, geographer, statistician, and lexicographer, author of numerous text-books for schools, and for more than half a century one of the most active and earnest friends of education, died at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the 27th of October, at the ripe age of eighty-one years. His great labors deserve and will receive a more full record in our pages.

Of foreign educators, deceased during the year, we do not now recall more than four names which possess a Cis-Atlantic reputation. These

were: H. G. OLLENDORFF, a teacher of languages in Paris, of Jewish extraction, who died on the 30th of October, and whose "system of acquiring French, Spanish, German, Italian, and other European languages," has had so extensive a circulation; CHARLES VON RAUMER, a German professor and author, who died in June, and whose writings on pedagogy and biographies on eminent German teachers have become familiar to us through Barnard's American Journal of Education; Dr. FARNZ AHN, & German physiologist and teacher of languages, deceased in September, whose "German Method" is widely known and used in this country; and Dr. CHARLES RICHARDSON, an eminent English lexicographer, who died on the 6th of October, at the age of ninety-one years, and whose great work, "The New Dictionary of the English Language," originally prepared for the Encyclopædia Metropolitana, was, for its time, the finest contribution to etymology which had been made in Great Britain. It has passed through several editions, notwithstanding its great size. He had also published several other philological works.

FOR

STREET CHILDREN.

OR several years our educational progress has been especially evinced in the interest manifested in the grading of schools, and in the establishment of grammar-schools, academies, and the higher institutions. Professorships have been liberally endowed; colleges have rapidly arisen. But there is one phase of popular education which has remained comparatively overlooked. Official returns show, that in this State, and elsewhere, a large portion of youth of the most impressionable age remain outside the school-room. Sufficient attention has not been given to the primary schools; and, of the advantages they afford, a vast number of the former classes have failed to avail themselves by sending their children. The consequences are felt everywhere; but, in a city like New York, they meet the eye in every thoroughfare, and to a fearful degree obtrude upon attention. Some sections of the city swarm with dull, listless, and with active, roaming children, who never attend school; or, if at all, with an irregularity that nullifies the advantages obtained. They become familiarized with vice, spend their youth in an apprenticeship to crime, and become eventually the coarse, dull-eyed, heavy-jawed rowdies, from whose ranks the penitentiaries and prisons are supplied.