"Will you lend me some?" she said timidly to Miss Rowan, who had seen her action, and was looking at her with a sort of amused pity.

"No, indeed I won't," Miss Rowan said decidedly, "not for that thing. I'll not help you to set such folly going. But listen," she said, suddenly changing her tone, "did not Mr. Montana say that the gifts of the unbelieving would only bring discredit on the cause a curse and not a blessing; didn't he?"

"He did, I think," Miss Marion answered faintly.

"Very well; then in that hope I make myself one of his contributors; and I give with a good will."

She tossed her purse contemptuously into the urn.

They came against Mrs. Fanshawe.

"We are going in to see him," Katherine said with sparkling eyes; "I sent Frank to tell him, and Frank says he will see us-in the reception-room, you know. He is seeing some people there; women mostly; howling swells, I suppose; duchesses and all that; but he'll see us. Isn't that sweet of him? Isn't he delightful? Doesn't he make one feel so good, and pure, and noble, and all that sort of thing? Doesn't he? The world all seems so poor and unreal. I have given something; haven't you? and I am going to send him some more. Won't you send him some more? But not in our own names ; he wouldn't have that. Oh! it's all glorious, I think."

Young Mr. Fanshawe came up.

"I think it's all a confounded imposture," he said, without waiting for any one to solicit his opinion. "He's a clever fellow enough, but he's a humbug. Don't you think so, Miss Rowan ?"

Already, poor Sydney Marion thought, he has learned to appeal only to her.

"I don't believe in him," Geraldine said with her accustomed energy; "I don't believe anything good will come of him or his enterprise; there is something unholy about him. I feel as if we had been assisting at a witch's sabbath."

The reception-room was crowded where Montana was receiving his friends. He spoke a hasty word or two to each person, whỏ came up to him in turn, and quietly passed them on. There were no formal presentations. Every one whom Montana did not know, either introduced himself or was taken for granted.

"What may I do to help your cause?" an earnest lady said, with the glitter of a tear in her eyes.

"Believe," said Montana, gently pressing her hand.

She went on satisfied. There did not seem, perhaps, any very direct practical instruction in his one word of advice, but it appeared to content her craving soul.

"I want to be in the thing," said a working man. "I want to help you all I can. What have I to do ?"

"Work," said Montana, looking fixedly down into his eyes. The man was of good stature, but Montana was able to look down upon him; and they shook hands, and Montana wrung his friend's rough hand with a gripe which thrilled him.

The man, too, went on his way satisfied. There was not much perhaps in being told to work. He had to work anyhow, and the one word gave him little guidance as to the best way of assisting Montana's special enterprise. But even one word, accompanied by such a look from such a face, and by the grasp of a hand which the working man found, to his surprise, considerably stronger than his own, was guidance and conviction for the time. The worker passed on, feeling a sort of vague awe, as if he had discoursed with a prophet.

An elderly, white-haired, smooth-spoken, graceful gentleman, with a double eye-glass, came softly up to Montana, announced himself as the Duke of Magdiel, and said the duchess particularly wished him to request that Mr. Montana would do her the favour of dining with them during his stay in town.

Montana drew back coldly.

"I have not the honour to know you," he said. "I have not come to London to be made a show of. I dine with my friends when I have time. You are not among the friends. I have something else to do in life besides going out to amuse strangers and to be stared at."

The abashed peer mumbled an excuse, of which Montana took little heed. The Duke of Magdiel passed along, disconcerted. Incivility puzzled him; he could not see the use of it.

A member of a small, strange, fantastic sect talked for a moment with Montana-a shabby, eager-looking man, whose wild eyes were looking through unkempt hair.

"We are a strange lot," he said to Montana. "We are not much in favour here. Every one dislikes us. They would persecute us if they could."

"I do not care about that," said Montana. "People dislike me, and would persecute me if they could. What do you want of me?" "We'd like to have a word or two quietly with you. Some of our people would like to join with you, and go out to your new

place. We are miserably off here. We have no money, and we have no friends-only enemies. Will you let some of us come and see you?"

"Have you a place of meeting?" Montana asked.

"We have a sort of a place up some flights of back stairs, down there."

He jerked his thumb in the supposed direction, and the wild eyes turned towards the east. Somewhere in the East End, doubtless, was the temple of this odd little group of sectaries.

"I will wait on you," said Montana. "Send me a message at once. You have only to name the time that suits you, and I will go there."

This was spoken in a low tone, apparently not meant to be heard; but it so happened that it was heard by most of those in the room. Thus it became known amongst those who were interested in the night's proceedings, that Mr. Montana had repelled with cold contempt the invitation of a duchess, and had promised to go at any time out of his way down to the East End, to wait upon a miserable little group of half-crazy and poverty-stricken fanatics. The effect was happy. It added to the interest felt in Mr. Montana. Even duchesses were now more anxious than ever to have him under their roofs, and fanatics and sectaries of all kinds were disposed to put full faith in him. The night had been a complete and a splendid

success.

A great crowd at the doors of the outer hall waited to catch a glimpse of the new prophet as he passed to the carriage which was known to be waiting for him. But Montana did not go out that way. He passed through a side corridor and a small door in another street, and walked home unseen and alone.

The carriage was there, however, for some time. At last the patient watchers, who still kept hoping for a sight of the prophet, saw that two or three pale and poor-looking girls, apparently of the sempstress class, were put into it by one of the liveried attendants, and heard the coachman get directions to drive them to some place in the Bethnal Green quarter. The patient watchers had something for their delay. They, too, had a story to tell of Mr. Montana. They were able to say to all they met next day, that they had seen Mr. Montana's carriage given up by him for the purpose of driving a few belated milliner girls amongst his audience to their home in Bethnal Green,

(To be continued.)

157

ON GARDEN SCHOOLS AND THE

FRŒBEL OR

KINDERGARTEN

SYSTEM OF EDUCATION.1

WE

E in England are as yet very little acquainted with the life and work of the educational reformer, Friedrich Froebel. His life was one of singular labour, of thought and of action; but the chief part of it was educational, and by that alone he lives. He was at one time a mineralogist, or at all events had a strong tendency for the study of the science, and after that, as Miss Shirreff tells us, he became a soldier. In the summer of 1812, according to her very clear narrative, he left the University of Göttingen and went to Berlin, and there found employment in a school of the same kind as the learned Institute at Frankfort which had been founded by a pupil of Pestalozzi of the name of Plamann. At this time, as he, Froebel, was commencing his labours as a teacher, the French power wielded by Napoleon was checked by its reverses in Russia. This, says our authoress, struck the hour of deliverance for Germany, and Prussia, so heavily oppressed and so steadily pursuing the means of revenge, called on every man to take up arms against the oppressor. The King's proclamation, the personal call "To my people," was responded to with enthusiasm, and Froebel, stirred by the call, joined with alacrity. "I had," he said, "a home, a land of my birth, but no fatherland. My own home made no call upon me. I was no Prussian, and so it happened that in my retired life the call to arms stirred me little. But something else there was which stirred me, if not with enthusiasm, yet with most steadfast determination, to take my place amongst the German soldiers, and this was the pure feeling, the consciousness of being a German, which I honoured as something noble and sacred in my own mind, and desired that it might be unfettered and able to make itself everywhere felt. Besides this teeling, I was also moved by the earnestness with which I embraced my mission as an educator."

'Address delivered from the chair at the annual meeting of the Fræbel Society in the large Hall of the Society of Arts, on Friday, December 10, 1880.

Froebel entered the army, joined, with other students, the renowned corps of Lutzow's "Black Riflemen," and served with them to the end of the war.

Leaving the military life, Fræbel returned for a short season to mineralogical pursuits; but soon the death of his brother caused him to retire from Berlin, where he was located, to the village of Kielhau, where he undertook the education of his brother's children, and of other children who joined his school. It was in this way that Froebel commenced the great work of his life, the work that has left his name amongst the names that justly remain historical.

The educational scheme which Froebel here developed must not be considered as unpremeditated by him. He had thought it well out before he began his practical work, and had probably all the details in his mind. Miss Shirreff takes note of two distinguishing features in Froebel's system which, so to say, lie at the bottom of it, and which are evidently of the premeditated order. These two principles, she tells us, are the recognition of practical activity as an integral part of education, and the parallel of the mental growth of the human being with the development of all other organisms in nature. With regard to the first, Pestalozzi had attached much value to manual exercise and handicraft of various kinds, but rather as parts of physical training and technical preparation for life, especially among the lower classes. With Froebel all outward training had an inward correlative-some mental faculty was always to be consciously brought into play, to be strengthened and directed aright, while the limbs were gaining vigour or dexterity. He did not value manual work for the sake merely of making a better workman, but for the sake of making a more complete human being. His teaching rested, says Hanschman, on the fundamental principle that the starting-point of all we know or are conscious of is action; and therefore education, or human development, must begin in action. Through what a man works out his inward being is developed. "Life, action, and knowledge were to Froebel the true notes of one harmonious chord. Book-study is ever in his system postponed to the strengthening and discipline of the mental and physical powers, through observation and active work. The young creature must be at home in his surroundings, learn to live, seek to understand outer and visible things, and to exercise its own creative faculty, before it is introduced to the inner world of thought, to symbols and abstractions, and made to gather up the fruit of other men's labour and experience. The second point, the unfolding of the human powers according to inner or organic laws, was at the core of the whole