nished me with opportunities of suggesting or enforcing subjects of consequence to us both, more fully than I could do in conversation.
Ancient and Modern Geography, with Natural and Moral Philosophy, were sources of mutual enjoyment. Each lesson was required to be studied at home, and their allotted portion of the precious school-hours devoted to recitation and explanation. I was careful not to drive their minds over too great a space at once, lest they should form a habit of being superficial. Neither would I burden them with too many studies at the same time, lest, by pressure or redundancy of aliment, the intellectual digestion should become impaired, or secret harm be done to the invisible network of nerves that link the material to the divine. Knowledge purchased by the wreck of health, is truly but "sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal." To us it was not a task, but, like our daily food, a necessity and a pleasure, for which we gave God thanks.
Four afternoons in the week we read History together, according to the system that has been already mentioned. I took great pains to have them connect with every event of consequence its correlative date. They soon felt the value of this as a map to arrest and deepen the traces of memory. They were pleased with the quaint axiom, that "Geography and Chronology are the eyes of History," and said, "We will not grope, like the blind, through the great Temple of the Past."
