A teacher in one of the primary schools of New York recently read to her pupils “The Old Oaken Bucket.”
After explaining the song to them very carefully, she asked the class to copy the first stanza from the blackboard, where she had written it, and try to illustrate the verse by drawings in the same way a story is illustrated.
In a short while one little girl handed up her paper with several little dots between two lines, a circle, half a dozen dots, and three buckets.
“I do not quite understand this, Mamie,” said the teacher, kindly. “What is that circle?”
“Oh, that’s the well,” Mamie replied.
“And why do you have three buckets?” again asked the teacher.
“One,” answered the child, “is the oaken bucket, one is the iron-bound bucket, and the other is the moss-covered bucket that hung in the well.”
“But, Mamie, what are all these little dots for?”
“Why those are the spots which my infancy knew,” earnestly replied Mamie.