"One by one they waddled to their places and the serving men brought in the chitterlings, the sausages, the headcheese, the fat puddings, the abbey beer, and honey. From his place at the table head, Philautus, the mighty abbot, called to them ever and anon. 'Lay on, lay in, my adiposeurs, for the greatness of old Goar.' All showed that they considered it a matter of great weight, each with a duty and himself to fulfill. They attended to both right lustily. Except Boethius, the mender. He, with his maul, was busy in the cellar putting more props under the bulging floors of the great hall.

"So wore the night away, as game pie succeeded fat capon and each was properly despatched, or as the Latin says, was in totum descendum, (all in). Then did Philautus, that great abbot, cause to be brought in upon the iron platter, three ells long, a huge swine, roasted. Eight serving men bore it. They set it at the table's head before the master. Then rose Philautus, that evil one. He pushed back his cowl. The brethren beheld the horns upon his head. He shook off his buskins. They saw his cloven hoofs. He threw off his habit. They saw behind him his long tail with the dart upon the end. He did dress the roasted swine in the holy garb of the abbot. He strode upon the table from end to end and as he came before each terror-stricken brother, the fiend did, with a fiery finger, trace upon each brow a hissing, blackened 'S'. Then leaping high in air, he laughed like the devil, he, Satanas. He crashed down through the table, the floor, the foundation, and through the solid rock to his home. All the time the devil's rattle was heard crashing through the clouds so that everyone for miles around was awakened and the children cried with fear. Boethius, mending, saw the flash. He ran to the great hall. There on their stools, each with an 'S' upon his forehead, sat his brethren, stark, rigid, inanimate, facing a great swine in the black and yellow habit of the abbot, while in their midst spouted a fountain of flame,

"Vain was the work of the serving men with buckets. They but broke the well by the gate. Vain were the cries and the wringing of hands of the people who came running and stood red-faced in the glare of the fire. Before daybreak there was but miscellanea carbonum cinerumque; a mess of coals and ashes.

"The young Boethius, novitiate, with his mender's bag upon his back sat by the Abbey gate altogether bewildered, errabundus. How comes it that the most learned abbot who knows the holy scriptures and the writings of the fathers and of St. Benedict and St. Goar complete, and whom all the devout brethren have followed and obeyed, is turned into a swine and he and all the fraters are roasted in the abbey? What signified the 'S' upon each forehead? 'S'-salve, salve, had the brethren called to each other in the morning. 'S'-saluto, had the abbot often called to him. 'S': sanctitas, had been the most frequent word in his own discourse. 'S'-sartor he was, a mender. What means the 'S'? Secretum it is; Sepultus, buried. Sinister, terrible. No answer to this mystery came to him. Obedient, and for their great idea, these holy men had won success (bene perveniunt) and then God had branded them in his wrath, smitten them with his lightnings, and consumed them with his fire. Quid refert? Quid refert? (What's the use?)

"The old Latin text goes at great length to interpret to us the unhappy bewilderment of the perplexed youth. He was 'as one sinking in the sea at night,' or 'as one suddenly and incurably blinded.' Not even remorse or repentance could relieve him for in all he had done his best. Utter hopelessness was upon him Quid refert? Quid refert?

"The bewildered young man concluded that he, the least worthy, had been overlooked in the great disaster. The simple thing is to hold one's head under water until one ceases to breathe. He made his way to the water

butt only to find it empty. A number of men and women and some children were gathered around the well. 'Ah, here comes the mender,' they cried. 'Now we can have water.'

"For what? for what?' asked the dazed Boethius, which is either a philosophical or a foolish question, or both.

"To drink and cook withal of course, and why not?' were the various answers.

"I also need water,' responded the mender, 'but for an opposite purpose, therefore I will mend the well.'

must eat. You may still see the spot where they assembled under the cherry trees by Johan Katzenberger's house. 'I shall mend the well better if I mend myself,' said Boethius. Therefore he joined them. But the Grundlebach well was not made whole before a delegation of the men of Boppard desired that the mender should do their town the kindness of restoring their seven watering places to a perfect state. Thus it came. about that from town to town Boethius was called farther and farther down the valley of the Rhine and God gave him good tools

"While he was working there came with their buckets, pipkins, flagons, kettles, and jorums, a party of men and women from Grundlebach. When they saw what Boethius was about, they entreated him to come to their village and mend their well.

"Oh, well,' said Boethius, 'there was something I was set upon doing but the water of Grundlebach will serve as well as the well of St. Goar.'

"Accordingly, he accompanied them northward. There were some young blades among them and some girls with fresh voices. The cheer of the morning sun and the perfume of the cherry blossoms inspired them that they sang cheerily as they fared.

"Now this is the song of the Grundlebachians:

Carmen Grundlebachorum

Adjutores, interpellatores

Ubi, loci, nusquam non

Hic animantes, hac absterentes
Quidnam, quodnam, rascalion?

which of course you know means this:

The helpers and the hinderers

Are all around the town

And those are here to lift us up And these to pull us down.

mended remained in good state for more years than ever before. As Boethius was bidden from town to town a new opinion germinated in the garden of his mind (begriffgarten; the German word is left among the Latin terms like a field flower in a greenhouse.) The thought blossomed as he was walking into Sinzig in the cool of the afternoon. It was this:

to plain prose. Boethius coming down the hill got the big idea into his head which ultimately made him known as St. Boethius: that every man is born into the world as a potential fulfillment of some undone work somewhere and the realization of the life of man is to find his work and do it. Job meditated on it; Solomon missed it. Aurelius repeated it daily. Carlyle essayed at it; Tennyson and Longfellow sung it; Washington Gladden preached it, and no matter what novelists, dramatists, and newspapers are featuring to the contrary, a large number of the inhabitants of the U. S. A. are living it all the time. From the From the moment he entered Sinzig to the end of his days, Boethius, the mender, had no bewilderment of mind nor subversive ideas as to his relations to a water butt. In Cologne an important looking gentleman in rich black and yellow garments advised him that in recognition of service the burgomaster proposed that an inscription was to be cut upon the stone arch: "The Well of St. Boethius.' To which the mender answered, 'Sanctum opus, si volis, non opifex'; (call the work holy if you wish, but not the worker). Facta non nomina (measures, not men).

"And then he asked the gentleman in yellow and black: 'I say, clever one, I now know what the name, Philautus, means, albeit I have but little Greek. Philautus-selflover, but what signifieth 'S'? Is it sibi, or selbe, or mayhap, Satanas? your autograph or maybe all, a monogram'?

"But the one in black and yellow spat fire three times and leaped over to Bonn where he was giving private lessons to the son of Otto the Margrave of Brandenburg, who thereby became a great scholar and

founded the University of Leipzig, the mother of many later ones all over the world.

"The rest of the chronicle is short enough. It tells how other menders inspired of God to learn of Boethius, became his followers, and set up the 'guild of the wells.' They chose as their device, which may still be seen cut in the stone of the wells of great cities, two hammers crossed within a wheel and under it the motto of the order, Amplium Antistamus, which might be translated: 'We make the well well.' The record tells briefly how Boethius mended wells in Flanders, Brabant, France, and Spain, crossed into England, went north and took up his abode in Kinross, and from the town called Scotland Well, near Loch Leven he sent out his well-menders to all parts of Caledonia from Kirkudbright to Caithness. And here he wrote 'the precepts,' those short Latin proverbs which circulate over his

name.

"But how is it that he is called Saint Boethius? Pure myth. He never took holy orders. He was a plain journeyman mechanic, given to thinking. He married a fine widow at Scotland Well. Boethius, as you well know, means 'the helper.' Many men in the annals of the world bear that name. It is spelled Boece, Boise, and Boyce. There are plenty of Scottish Boyces all over the world. My mother's father" said Ludwig, "was one."

Now this has been strung out longer than is necessary. But hear one thing more. I'll wager that the whole Boethius tale, illuminated manuscript and all, was the work of delicious old Boyce Ludwig himself, founder of the Chair of Civic Duty, who would surely admit it if you were so utterly lacking in romance as to ask him.

-CARLYLE.

-ARISTOTLE.

HR

OW I pity the school children! We each of us, we pedagogs, must try out a new theory on them. It is thus that many of us achieve fame in our profession. Indeed there has grown up a group of men who call themselves "professional experts," in distinction to the "subject or content experts," each one of whom must theorize and experiment with the innocents. I do not argue that educational methods shall not advance. We must not still teach by the blab-school method of our backwoods ancestors. But there seems too large a number of theorizers and a still larger number of theories, and yet, strangely, there are so few fundamental facts.

I am a college teacher and as such I do not deal directly with the primary and secondary grades, except as I come in contact with teachers taking higher work. Perhaps I am doomed to know the faults of earlier education better than its virtues. I find the student coming to college with little preparation in methods of study or in logic. When I blame this on the high schools, I am told that I must go further and blame the grade schools. What I deplore most is the slight conception of logical processes of thinking. There seems to be too little equipment in the freshman's mind to permit him to develop the habits of logical processes. Too often, this is due to a laissez-faire method of teaching, but again its cause lies in the fact that the student has been experimented with and the task of acquiring facts and deducing conclusions has not been taught.

My teaching subject happens to be geography and I am tremendously interested in the great variety of elementary geography

texts which have been put into the teaching field. As a teacher of teachers, I have made it my concern to examine these texts. Each text strives to present a new idea in teaching. Every one has its virtues. I am glad when each one comes out for the contribution which it makes. On the other hand, these texts illustrate in certain cases what I have been saying. They fail to introduce the discipline and the simple approach to logic in happy combination and proportion. A child loves logic. When first he becomes conscious of mental processes he is delighted. He does not need to be inveigled into logical mental processes by circuitous methods. He likes the direct fact, and its simple conclusion is his little victory. Now in order to evolve for him direct processes of thinking, we must of a necessity get down to fundamentals. The child is happy to see that, by himself, he has built up a simple structure of facts. It is the mentally constructed conception built by himself that the child most enjoys. It is his own. This is more particularly true for the middle grades than the more elementary classes. By the third and possibly the second grade the young mind need no longer tell what he sees in "the pretty picture." The exercise of this sort bores him. What is demanded by the growing mind is more intellectual. We need no longer work from the child's experience downward. We can take the fact and lead it to its conclusion. Were a blind man to be taught the form and purpose of a tree, how would we teach him the proper conception? By elevating him to a branch and permitting him to feel first the twig and then the trunk and finally the roots? I once