VIII. Some Possible Subjects

  1. The Gas Engine that Jack built.
  2. A Profitable Garden.
  3. How a Boy earned his Education.
  4. A Cabinet.
  5. How to bind Books.
  6. Stocking and keeping an Aquarium.
  7. How to build a Flatboat.
  8. How to make Dolls from Corn-Husks.
  9. Metallic Band Work.
  10. A Sled made of Ice.
  11. Silk Culture.
  12. Chickens.
  13. A Good Notebook.
  14. A Sketch-Book.
  15. A Successful Composition.
  16. Skees.
  17. A Paper Boat.
  18. Toys made in the Manual Training Rooms.
  19. A Hat.
  20. A Dress.
  21. The best subject of all, however, is none of these, but one that the pupil finds himself.

IX. Suggested Reading

Elbert Hubbard’s A Message to Garcia.

X. Memorize

A PSALM OF LIFE (continued from [Page 7])

Trust no future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, act in the living Present!
Heart within and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us,
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

To Teachers. At this point a review of Chapter V, “Proof-Reading” and Chapter VI, “The Correction of Themes,” of Practical English Composition, Book I, will be found an invaluable exercise.
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CHAPTER III
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICES

“Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime.”

Longfellow.