a tiny window: The tough birch-bark would bend readily. I would shut the window in leaving by means of a long, sharp thorn.
CHAPTER VII
TO THE TEACHER
Make a point of going into the winter woods and fields, taking the pupils as often as possible with you. It may be impossible for your city children to get the rare chance of glare ice; but don’t miss it if it comes.
This is the time to start your bird-study; to awaken sympathy and responsibility in your pupils by teaching them to feed the birds; to cultivate cheerfulness and the love of “hardness” in them by breasting with them a bitter winter gale for the pure joy of it. Use the suggestions here for whatever of resourcefulness and hardiness you can cultivate in the girls as well as in the boys.
FOR THE PUPIL
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the good things to read: To name only a few of them, we might mention John Burroughs’s “Winter Sunshine” and “Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers,” Bradford Torrey’s “Footing it in Franconia,” Frank Bolles’s “At the North of Bearcamp Water,” William Hamilton Gibson’s “Eye Spy,” William L. Finley’s “American Birds,” and Edward Breck’s “Wilderness Pets.”
CHAPTER VIII
TO THE TEACHER
I believe this to be one of the most important chapters in the volume, dark and terrible as its lesson may appear. But grim, dark death itself is not so dark as fear of the truth. If you teach nothing else, by precept and example, teach love for the truth—for the whole truth in nature as everywhere else. Winter is a fact; let us face it. Death is a fact; let us face it; and by facing it half of its terror will disappear; nay more, for something of its deep reasonableness and meaning will begin to appear, and we shall be no more afraid. The all of this is beyond a child, as it is beyond us; but the habit of looking honestly and fearlessly at things must be part of a child’s education, as later on it must be the very sum of it.
Great tact and fine feeling must be exercised if you happen to have among the scholars one of the handicapped—one lacking any part, as the muskrat lacked—lest the application be taken personally. But let the lesson be driven home: the need every boy and girl has for a strong, full-membered body,—even for every one of his teeth,—if he is to live at his physical best.