And the church, where the dead lie asleep.
You would never think that the country road,
From the hill to the store, could be
So long to a boy with an errand to do
And another boy to see.

You can never dream how short it is

From the farm to the frozen pond,
Nor how very much farther it always is
To the schoolhouse just beyond.
Oh, the country road! at the farther end
It runs up hill and down,

Away from the woods and the rippling brook.
To the toiling, rushing town.

But, best of it all when you're tired and sick
Of the weary haunts of men,

If you follow it back, it will lead you home
To the woods and fields again.

-Gussie Packard Du Bois in June St. Nicholas.

CONTRIBUTIONS.

A VACATION GLIMPSE OF PISA.

Far up on the sides of Monte Falterona, in the Umbrian Appenines, rises a brook, which tumbles through rocky defiles into the lovely Val d'Arno, whence it sweeps under the shady forests of Vallombrosa; then, swollen by tributaries, it winds beneath the picturesque bridges and beside the palaces and gardens of beautiful Florence, and, after tortuous wanderings through the plains of Tuscany, pours On its muddy waters into the gulf of Genoa. this river, the Arno, about six miles from its mouth, is situated the ancient city of Pisa. Everybody knows it because of its famous leaning tower, but not every one knows its long and romantic annals. As you dismount from the cars at the Pisa station, you see before you a stretch of the ancient wall, which once surrounded the city, when it was larger and much more powerful, than at present. During the eleventh century it waged a long war with Lucca, ten miles to the north. These strong walls were then necessary to protect the citizens from the dangers and surprises of such a neighborhood warfare. But the powerful Pisa of the middle ages had more signal triumphs than that over Lucca. She saw the terrible Saracens within her city walls, struggling hand to hand with her citizens; and not only did she drive them out, but she followed them on the sea with a fleet of three hundred sails; she wrested from them the islands of Sardinia and Corsica; and in 1062 her ships returned from Palermo, in Sicily, laden with their spoils. Then came the time of her magnificence. Pisa furnished a powerful contingent of more than 200 ships to the forces of the crusaders; she adorned her own confines with the magnificent group of buildings to which the leaning tower belongs; she built great banks and warehouses; and her merchants reaped rich harvests from the commerce opened to them by her victories. In 1116 her fleet returned again richly laden with the spoils of the Moslems, gained in the conquest of the Balearic Isles, and glorying most of all in the fact that she had released 20,000 Christian prisoners from servitude to the Moors. Then came calamity. The jealousy of the Genoese was awakened. A long war broke out between the two cities, and first Lucca joined her enemies, then Florence; the heroic struggle which followed wasted her resources and ended in her defeat. The succeeding vicissitudes make a long and intricate story, and only mark the stages of decline for the city. One dark tragedy, out of

many which these years brought, has been rendered famous in poetry and art. Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, belonged to one of the noblest families of Pisa. He made himself leader of the popular party, and thereby incurred the hatred of the nobility. They, getThey, getting the upper hand in some of the struggles, procured his banishment. He then joined the Florentines in a war against his own city and was then restored to Pisa. Here he again quickly became head of the government; but as the wars he led went badly for the Pisans he was accused of treachery. All the old hatred against him flamed up. Early one morning the great bell of the commune rang wildly, summoning together the adherents of the aristocratic party; it was answered quickly by the bell of the people, which gathered the partisans of the count. The battle in the streets was fierce and clamorous. At length Ugolino and his adherents were forced to take refuge in the Palazzo del Popolo, or town hall. All efforts to dislodge them from this stronghold proving futile, towards night the aristocrats fired the hall, and, making their way into the building in the wild confusion of the conflagration, they dragged out Ugolino with his two young sons and his two nephews and threw them as prisoners into the dungeon of the Tower of the Seven Streets. The key of this was intrusted to the archbishop, a partisan of the nobles, but one who, as a minister of religion, might be supposed to be inclined to mercy. Instead, the implacable hate of a mediæval partisan burned in his bosom; and after a few weeks, when attention was attracted from the prisoners, he tossed the key of the prison into the Arno. Imagination is left to paint the scenes in the dungeon as the stern count, without power to help or hope of relief, saw his sons and nephews waste away and die of hunger before his eyes. Dante, in the thirty-third book of his Inferno, causes the shade of the old count to tell the tale of those awful days, and Chaucer has made it a part of his Monk's Tale. In Dante's fierce outcry against Pisa we join at least so far as to say with him:

"What if fame

Reported that thy castles were betray'd
By Ugolino, yet no right hadst thou
To stretch his children on the rack."

All this may be taken as a brief glimpse of the life of the middle ages. The cities warring with their neighbors; the civil broils; the treachery and heartlessness; the religious fervor; the magnificent ecclesiastical buildings; the squalor and wretchedness of the poor. Let us complete the picture by viewing the cathedral at Pisa. To reach this we cross

from the railroad station north through the city, past the tower of famine in which Ugolino and his sons perished, over the Arno, to the northwest corner of the city enclosure. Here, upon a green knoll, where English daisies smile upon us from the short grass, stands a miracle of architecture, a group of the most beautiful buildings in the world. They are four-the cathedral (or church), the baptistry, the campanile or bell tower, and the Campo Santo, or sacred burying place. You come suddenly upon the group, emerging from the busy streets of a modern city, and seem to yourself to have passed all at once to another world. The bustle and dust of business are behind you. Before you upon the daisied lawn stands a large and marvellously graceful structure of white marble. As it gleams and sparkles under the morning sun, glowing immaculately bright against the azure sky, it seems a creation from fairy land, a wonder from the Arabian Nights, too rich and rare for this work-a-day world. Its erection was begun in 1068, and a little more than two centuries were required for the completion of the entire group.

Thus we have before us the true monument of Pisan splendor-the flower of its prosperity and its religious aspiration. The cathedral is in the form of a Latin cross, with an internal length of 312 feet and a breadth of 252 feet-a mighty building to one who has not yet seen St. Paul's in London, or St. Peter's at Rome. Stand before the front of it, and it seems a church built upon the roof of a larger church. For the gable is cut off at the peak in order to allow the building of another smaller cathedral upon it. This upper and narrower portion is called the clere-story. The lighting of the interior is chiefly accomplished through the windows in this upper part. Now take in some of the details: the front is ornamented with four lovely arcades, composed of a rich array of light marble pillars surmounted with round arches, two rows on the lower building and two on the clere-story. Pure white statues, angles out of the azure sky above, stand on the corners of the gables. Your eye follows the line of the eaves to where the arms meet the beam of the cross, and there a small and graceful dome surrounded at its base by arcades like those of the front and adorned on top by a small globe surmounted with a gleaming cross, rises to crown the structure. All is light, delicate, exquisite, a miracle of the Romanesque architecture. Enter the great door. You walk on a marble floor, amid a veritable forest of exquisite marble columns. After a little the order and

meaning of it all becomes apparent. There are four rows of Corithian columns, surmounted with round arches, which divide the interior into five aisles, the broader of which is in the center under the clere-story. A second passage as richly crowded, traverses the former crosswise, and above this beautiful grove of marble, files of smaller columns prolong the perpendicular effect. At the intersection of nave and transept the dome springs up into the heavens. How exquisite and imposing it is! The long side walls, broken only with small windows, are covered with large paintings, scenes from scripture history, which made. them the bible of the poor in an age when the art of reading was not common.

As we wander about, taking in these details, at length the tones of a voice reach us with the regular cadences of a public speaker. We follow them up, and find a monk preaching in one arm of the transept. The pulpit is fastened against one of the columns, and the small audience is seated on rude wooden benches which are gathered in a semicircle about it. We had been in the church for some time before we were aware that a serv ice was going on in it. These great mediaval structures were made for religious processions, not for preaching. In the dark recesses under the columns the procession could be organized, and passing up and down these long aisles displayed to the best advantage the pomp of ecclesiastical ceremony.

Emerging now from the transept door, we are startled by a rattle shaken violently at our ears, and turning quickly confront an apparition from the middle ages, -a human figure clothed in a black monk's cloak girt about the loins with a rope, and having the black hood drawn so as to cover the face except that two round holes permit coal-black eyes to gleam out upon us. The first impulse is to escape, but a contribution box which the figure thrusts in our way makes plain that we have not encountered the ghost of a twelfth century monk, but a very modern brother of his, from whom a few pence deposited in his box, draw forth a profound bow of thanks.

The leaning tower stands about one hundred feet from that end of the cathedral which may be called the head of the cross. It is the bell tower. The early Christian assemblies were held in private dwellings, and when this was possible, in the large dwellings belonging to rich converts. The most convenient room for the gatherings was the basilica, so called from the public Roman building after which it was planned. This was a quadrangle, with aisles down two sides of it formed by rows of col

umns supporting the roof. Thus the earliest churches came to be built in the basilica form, and are known as basilicas. When it was desirable to enlarge these the symbolical meaning of the cross led to the adoption of that form and the transept approved; and, in the east especially, a dome was soon erected over the intersection. The tower for the bell was, at first, built apart from the church, but later it became customary to add the bell tower to the structure, and for symmetry other towers were also added to balance it. Thus the more modern forms were gradually evolved.

This bell tower at Pisa is cylindrical in form and adorned with columns and arcades like the cathedral. There are six stories of these, and upon the top of the tower another smaller tower of one story is erected. The whole structure is of great weight, and is about as high as the dome. It leans over to one side fourteen feet from the perpendicular. The effect is dizzying. Was it a freak of the builders, who sought thus to add a bizarre interest to their work? Or was it rather, an accident due to the gradual settling of the foundations? The latter seems to be the better opinion, as an effort to correct the inclination is discoverable in the upper stories in a small lengthening of the columns on the side of the incline. But, on the other hand, it is said that there are other leaning towers, notably that at Bologna, and that this love of the strange, the fanciful, the paradoxical, is one characteristic of the middle ages. Like others we must gaze and admire, and go away leaving the problem unsolved.

Opposite the other end is the baptistry, a large circular building with a dome roof. Its ornamentation is [in general] like that of the cathedral and the bell-tower. Within it is a marvelously rich baptismal font, and the renowned marble pulpit of Nicolo Pisano. The guide. who takes you in closes the door behind you, and stepping forward so as to be beyond the gallery, which runs around the interior, sings a chord, first, third and fifth. The dome and sides give the tones back to you in a rich blending of sounds, which dies away gradually in long swells and cadences, one of the richest echoes in the world.

In these three marvellously rich and lovely structures we seem to see a worthy monument of Pisa's splendid prosperity. Into these went a part of the spoils which her galleys brought back from Palermo and the Balearic Isles. In the Campo Santo we touch the life and breathe. the very atmosphere of the Crusades. Here is a portion of the holy earth of Jerusalem, brought back by her Crusading sons, and laid

down to make a burial place for her heroes and her saints, one that would bring them a little nearer to Paradise than the common soil of Italy could. Around this quadrangle of sacred earth a low building has been erected. Its exterior is an almost unbroken wall ornamented with one row of arcades of Corinthian columns and springing arches. Within, are cloisters open to the quadrangle through a series of mullioned windows. It is a weird place. The cloistered isles are paved with sepulchral slabs; you are walking upon the graves of heroes-the sunbeams straying through the open tracery of the windows fall upon effigies of crusaders and monks; around are antique relics-the chains of the city which indicated its subjection to Florence in the evil days of decay, now returned and hung up in evidence of the restoration of amity; sculptures of ancient and mediæval times; sarcophagi in which have lain the bodies of kings and knights; and on the walls weird mediæval paintings, seamed, and battered, and faded, the treasures which made this spot one of the Meccas of students of art;-from these turn now and look through the windows at the dark cypresses in the corners of the quadrangle, which cast long shadows over the sward growing on the earth from Jerusalem; and then ask yourself whether you are not in body as well as in spirit transported back to the twelfth century. These pictures about you are not mere works of art, valuable as they are for tracing the history of painting. There is an awful seriousness in them. Here we see The Last Judgment, Orcagna's Vision of Hell, The Triumph of Death, and so on. They are devoid of perspective, crude and childish in composition, defective in modeling, but profoundly genuine in sentiment and sincere in purpose. Art as seen here is a language, speaking to the heart of the people the tremendous doctrines of their religion. The lessons which it The lessons which it taught the wayfaring man though a fool could hardly fail to understand.

CONTINUOUS SESSIONS OF SCHOOLS.

S.

About a half dozen years ago it was announced that Chicago University, then just founded, would continue in session all the year. This announcement was received with some surprise and questioning, but the university has never lacked students during the summer quarter when it was formerly supposed people could not study, and the plan has been in every way a success. The desire for opportunity to improve during the summer has also been so great that short summer sessions

have been advertised by universities and other institutions all over the United States and attended by thousands. In Minnesota besides the Summer school at the university the state provided for four weeks summer schools for teachers in about fifty counties, and these were attended last year by about 6,000 teachers and prospective teachers.

Two or three years ago President Irwin Shepard proposed to his faculty of the normal school at Winona that the school adopt the Chicago University plan of continuous session, and after a spirited discussion they unanimously favored it. He then presented the matter to the other normal presidents and to the State Normal Board, who after a careful discussion decided that it would be well for all of the normal schools of Minnesota to hold continuous sessions. President Shepard sent out letters to city and county superintendents and other educators of the state describing the plan and asking what they thought of it. The replies were almost universally favorable. The State Normal Board then resolved to ask the legislature of last winter to appropriate the money necessary for the carrying out of the plan. The idea was a new one to most of the members of the legislature, but when they heard the arguments in favor of it and learned how it was viewed by the educators of the state they were fully convinced of the advantages of the plan and of the public sentiment in favor it. Yet the finances of the state were low and the plan with all its apparent advantages was regarded as something of an experiment, so appropriations were made for trying it in but two of the four normal schools of the state, the one at Winona and the one at Mankato.

Cir

As the summer quarter is to begin July 1st, prompt action was necessary in order to prepare for the change in plan. It was found less difficult, however, than was expected to rearrange the program of the courses of study so that without much increase in number of classes or teachers students could enter any quarter of the year or stay out any quarter and yet find classes in all subjects necessary for the continuation of their course. culars have already been sent out announcing the opening of the summer quarter July 1st, describing the plan of continuous session and giving schedule of the subjects offered each quarter. Announcement is also made of a special six weeks term for teachers in service, which will enable them to continue teaching, and yet take a regular course leading to a diploma.

The financial advantages of the plan to the

states.

The advantages to those who wish to prepare themselves to teach, especially those who support themselves wholly or in part, are evident, for they can teach one or two terms and study in the normal one or two terms a year without interfering with their course of study, but rather with advantage to it for the the alternate experience of being pupil, then teacher and the practice of teaching in connection with the study of methods, will add very much to the value of the normal course. To teachers in service wishing to improve themselves, the special six weeks courses offer all the advantages of the summer schools now attended by so many thousands, and the additional one of having each summer's study contribute towards a definite course of training.

The common schools of the state will be benefited by the additional number of trained teachers and the improvement of those already in service. So great is this advantage thought to be for the country schools that the committee appointed by the National Educational Association to report upon the rural school problem, will mention the "Winona plan" of continuous ssssions as one promising means of solving the problem of how to improve the district schools.

The instructors in normal schools and the schools themselves, will also gain something from the plan if it is wisely carried out, for instructors are required to serve but three-quarters in the year, and they will be able to take vacations at a time of year and of a sufficient length (by teaching continuously for awhile), to make it possible to travel or study to the best advantage and then return refreshed and broadened to infuse new life and vigor into the normals.

So advantageous from every point of view seems the plan of continuous sessions of normal schools that many state superintendents have expressed themselves in favor of it and it is likely that some of them will urge the matter upon their respective legislatures at the earliest opportunity; so it is not improbable

If

The question now arises as to whether the idea may not be carried still further. If continuous sessions is a good thing for normal schools, would it not be of similar advantage to have our public schools, and colleges, and universities in session all of the time? Many of the arguments given above would seem to apply to other schools as well as to normals. Would it not be a good thing if a large proportion of the children between six and eighteen, especially in the cities, were in school instead of on the street during the summer. school work is not made too hard is there any reason other than custom for pupils suspending their work for one-fourth of the year? Even if the above is not admitted would it not be an advantage to pupils to be able to attend at any time of the year which is most convenient? Would not the adoption of the quarter, instead of the year, as the unit in grading also be of great advantage not only to irregular pupils, but to exceptionally quick and exceptionally slow children, who now have to advance or fall behind a whole year at a time?

The above facts and questions suggest the idea that possibiy we are just entering upon a new epoch in the history of the development of education in this country-an epoch in which schools of all kinds will be a continuous instead of an intermittent factor in our national life. It is certain, at least, that all thoughtful educators will watch with interest the development and spread of the idea as it is discussed in the papers and in educational gatherings, and as it is worked out in the schools adopting it. E. A. KIRKPATRICK.

Winona, Minn.

Ginn & Co.

BOOK TABLE.

-METHOD IN HISTORY, for teachers and students, by William H. Mace, (311 pp.; $1.10), grew, the author tells us, out of almost daily conferences over the problems of general and special method, in connection with Prof. Tomkins' Philosophy of Teaching. The parallelism with that work in the general movement of this essay is obvious. Prof. Mace sees in history not merely the external events but also the internal ideas or purposes impelling the nation and the individuals, and seeks the unifying point of view in the inner field. The ideas give rise both to the continuity and the differentiation apparent in historic development, and these cluster about five great institutions which constitute the warp of history. The business of the student is to interpret events, and the interpretation is found in the convictions and purposes of the actors. In following out these in their origin and results he comes into intimate contact with the life of the people. Looked at as causes these ideas or motives are found to be less and more general, so that in thoroly tracing out this relation history is seen to be continuous and unified. The organic historical whole comes to view in general motives or tendencies. The growth of in