tion there has disappointed me-has greatly disappointed me. You have not acquired, under Mr. and Mrs. M'Choakumchild, anything like that amount of exact knowledge which I look for. You are extremely deficient in your facts. Your acquaintance with figures is very limited. You are altogether backward, and below the mark.”

"I am sorry, sir," she returned; "but I know it is quite true. Yet I have tried hard, sir."

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"Yes," said Mr. Gradgrind, yes, I believe you have tried hard; I have observed you, and I can find no fault in that respect."

"Thank you, sir. I have thought sometimes "-Sissy very timid here—" that perhaps I tried to learn too much, and that if I had asked to be allowed to try a little less, I might have

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No, Jupe, no," said Mr. Gradgrind, shaking his head in his profoundest and most eminently practical way. "No. The course you pursued, you pursued according to the system-the system-and there is no more to be said about it. I can only suppose that the circumstances of your early life were too unfavourable to the development of your reasoning powers, and that we began too late. Still, as I have said already, I am disappointed."

"I wish I could have made a better acknowledgment, sir, of your kindness to a poor forlorn girl who had no claim upon you, and of your protection of her."

"Don't shed tears," said Mr. Gradgrind. "Don't shed tears. I don't complain of you. You are an affectionate, earnest, good young woman, and-and we must make that do."

How blind a man must become when his faith in a system or a philosophy can make him estimate fact storing so much and character forming so little! Sissy could not learn facts, therefore Mr. Gradgrind mourned. The fact that she was "affectionate, earnest, good," was only a trifling matter-a very poor substitute for brilliant acquirements in dates and facts and mental arithmetic.

Sissy became, however, the good angel of the Gradgrind household. She helped Louisa back to a partial hope and sweetness; she gave the younger children, with Mr. Gradgrind's permission, the real childhood of freedom and imagination, which the older children had lost for

ever; she brightened the lives even of Mrs. and Mr. Gradgrind, and she helped to save Tom from the disgrace of his crime.

The closing picture of the book, one of the most beautiful Dickens ever painted, tells the story of Sissy's future:

But happy Sissy's happy children loving her; all children loving her; she, grown learned in childish lore; thinking no innocent and pretty fancy ever to be despised; trying hard to know her humbler fellow-creatures, and to beautify their lives of machinery and reality with those imaginative graces and delights, without which the heart of infancy will wither up, the sturdiest physical manhood will be morally stark death, and the plainest national prosperity figures can show will be the Writing on the Wallshe holding this course as part of no fantastic vow, or bond, or brotherhood, or sisterhood, or pledge, or covenant, or fancy dress, or fancy fair; but simply as a duty to be done. Did Louisa see these things of herself? These things were to be!

Dear reader! It rests with you and me whether, in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not. Let them be! We shall sit with lighter bosoms on the hearth, to see the ashes of our fires turn gray and cold.

And the educational Gradgrinds of the present time sneer at Dickens because he puts the early training of a circus above the early training of a Christian home like Mr. Gradgrind's. "The logical consequence of such reasoning," they say, "would be that all children should be trained in circuses."

Oh, no! Dickens did not recommend a circus as a good place to train children. But he did believe that even a circus is a thousand times better than a so-called Christian home for the true and complete development of a child, if in the circus the child is free and happy, and is allowed full play for her imagination, and is not arrested in her development by rote storing of facts and too early drill in arithmetic, and has the rich productive love of even one parent, and has blessed opportunities for loving service for her pets and her friends; and if in the so-called Christian home she is robbed of these privileges even in the name of religion.

Sissy had a blessed, free childhood. She lived in her own imaginary world most of the time; she had the deep love of her kind-hearted father and of Merrylegs, the dog; she read poetry and fairy tales; she attended to her father's needs; she had many opportunities to show her love in loving service for Merrylegs and her father; and she was not dwarfed by fact cramming and formal drill. Her chances of reaching a true womanhood were excellent, and when she got the opportunity for the revelation of character, she had character to reveal, and her character developed in its revelation for the benefit and happiness of others. Hers was the true Christian training after all. Homes and schools with such training are centres of great

power.

One of the strongest pleas ever made for the cultivation of the imagination, "the fancies and affections," and for the teaching of literature, art, and music in the schools was given in Hard Times, which is an industrial as well as an educational story. Indeed, Dickens saw that the true solution of industrial questions was the proper training of the race. No attack on the meanness of utilitarianism and no exposition of its terrible dangers could be more incisive and philosophical than the following wonderful sentences:

Utilitarian economists, skeletons of schoolmasters, commissioners of fact, genteel and used-up infidels, gabblers of many little dog's-eared creeds, the poor you will have always with you. Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies and affections, to adorn their lives so much in need of ornament; or, in the moment of your triumph, when romance is utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face to face, Reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you!

Altogether Hard Times is one of the most remarkable educational books ever written.

Dickens made a plea for mental refreshment and recreation for the working classes in Nobody's Story, similar to that made in Hard Times:

The workingman appealed to the Bigwig family, and said: “We are a labouring people, and I have a glimmer

ing suspicion in me that labouring people of whatever condition were made by a higher intelligence than yours, as I poorly understand it-to be in need of mental refreshment and recreation. See what we fall into, when we rest without it. Come! Amuse me harmlessly, show me something, give me an escape!"

Beautiful Lizzie Hexam, one of the latest and highest creations of Dickens, longed to read, but she did not learn to do so because her father objected so bitterly, and she wished to avoid everything that would weaken the bond of love between them, lest she might lose her influence for good over him.

Her brother Charley said to her:

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"You said you couldn't read a book, Lizzie. Your library of books is the hollow down by the flare, I think." I should be very glad to be able to read real books. I feel my want of learning very much, Charley. But I should feel it much more, if I didn't know it to be a tie between me and father."

Dickens was revealing the strange fact that at first many poor and ignorant parents strenuously objected to their children being educated; and he was at the same time showing that great character growth could take place even without the power to read. Lizzie's self-sacrifice for her father and Charley was a true revelation of the divinity in her nature. Though she had not read books, she had read a great deal by her imagination from "the hollow down by the flare.”

As Dickens grew older he saw more clearly the value of the dreaming of childhood while awake, of the deep reveries into which young people often fall, and ought to fall, so that they become oblivious to their environment, and sweep through the universe in strange imaginings, that after all are very real. He was fond of drawing pictures of young people giving free rein to their imaginations, unchecked by intermeddling adulthood, while they watched the glowing fire, or the ashes falling away from the dying coals. Lizzie's library from which she got her culture was in "the hollow down by the flare."

Crippled little Jenny Wren, the doll's dressmaker, said to Lizzie Hexam one day, when Eugene Wrayburn was visiting them:

"I wonder how it happens that when I am work, work, working here, all alone in the summer time, I smell flowers."

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As a commonplace individual, I should say," Eugene suggested languidly-for he was growing weary of the person of the house-" that you smell flowers because you do smell flowers."

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"No, I don't," said the little creature, resting one arm upon the elbow of her chair, resting her chin upon that hand, and looking vacantly before her; 'this is not a flowery neighbourhood. It's anything but that. And yet, as I sit at work, I smell miles of flowers. I smell roses till I think I see the rose leaves lying in heaps, bushels, on the floor. I smell fallen leaves till I put down my hand-so-and expect to make them rustle. I smell the white and the pink May in the hedges, and all sorts of flowers that I never was among. For I have seen very few flowers indeed in my life."

"Pleasant fancies to have, Jennie dear! " said her friend, with a glance toward Eugene as if she would have asked him whether they were given the child in compensation for her losses.

And the

"So I think, Lizzie, when they come to me. birds I hear! Oh!" cried the little creature, holding out her hand and looking upward, “how they sing!"

How life in any stage might be filled with richness and joy, if imaginations were stored with apperceptive elements and allowed to reconstruct the universe in our fancies! How truly real our fancies might become!

In A Child's Dream of a Star Dickens gives an exquisite picture of the influence of imagination in spiritual evolution.

There was once a child, and he strolled about a good deal, and thought of a number of things. He had a sister, who was a child too, and his constant companion. These two used to wonder all day long. They wondered at the beauty of the flowers; they wondered at the height and blueness of the sky; they wondered at the depth of the