tion has a far wider field from which to choose. If he has been alone in a sail-boat when a storm came up, he can put on paper the record of his experiences can tell how he thought the weather so fine that he set the full mainsail, and was careless enough not to hoist the boom to the proper point; how the wind freshened; how he could have weathered it had it not been for the boom; how the boom buried itself in one huge wave and stuck, so that the boat balanced on one edge and then keeled over; how he yelled lustily for help as he struck the water, -and so forth. He can tell us of his visit to a lime-kiln, or a boot and shoe factory; his first evening at the theater; the care necessary to keep a bicycle in order; how he failed to make money, keeping bees; what a torture his first dancing lesson was, and so on. Life is full of interest to any normal boy or girl; and what is interesting to them can be made interesting to other people, if told sincerely, simply, and with enough detail to make the account vivid.

2. Subjects Taken from Our Studies.-Every intelligent student derives many new ideas from his various studies. To a boy, manual training should suggest dozens of subjects in the course of a year; domestic science as many to a girl. When American history is being studied, the student might write the story of the battle of Bunker Hill from the point of view of a participant or an eye-witness; or he might describe Boston in the days of Benjamin Franklin; or tell of Marion's raids on the British troops; or give a simple but specific comparison of life on a Massachusetts farm and on a Virginia plantation about the time of the Revolution. Botany shows us the flowers, not as Shakespeare saw one kind,

Daffodils that come before the swallow dares,
And take the winds of March with beauty,-

but as marvelous contrivances, the explanation of which will give us useful training in saying exactly what It is difficult, in short, to think of a branch of study which will not give us many things to talk or write about.

we mean.

3. Subjects Drawn from Our Reading.-The third source of subjects is our reading, (a) of newspapers and magazines; (b) of biographies, novels, plays, poems, books of travel,-in short what we know as literature. Most of our information about what is going on in the world comes from newspapers and magazines. Here we learn of the great conquest of the air in the early years of the twentieth century; of the discovery of the North Pole; of the progress of the Panama Canal; of the demand for woman's suffrage in England. High school students, naturally, cannot contribute new facts to these discussions; but they can do themselves a service by arranging and sifting the information they gather from newspapers and magazines, and expressing their ideas on the subjects treated. And a boy who lives near the inventors of the biplane in Ohio, could tell what the townsfolk saw of the gradual progress of the invention; a girl who lives in a state where woman's suffrage is established could tell how it works. Here again, as in the case of subjects drawn from our studies, the chief gain is in (a) settling for one's self what one knows or thinks; (b) getting the power to state facts and beliefs with precision.

The most obvious and natural sources of ideas are the life immediately about us and the record of that life in newspapers and magazines. But literature is a scarcely less important source. Books represent life at secondhand, it is true, but they introduce us to persons and places and times we should never know without them; they show us life from a hundred new angles,

thereby giving us a better understanding of it than we should get without them. It is safe to say that a book which gives us nothing to think about, to talk about, and, hence, to write about, is not worth reading. This does not mean that only "deep" books should be read. Many books not written to convey facts or to impart truths, may, if we read them intelligently, give us much that is worth thinking about. Kipling's Jungle Book will not teach us much about natural history, but it will give us sympathy with animals and a keener enjoyment of wild life. Scott's Kenilworth should not be read merely for the history it contains; that could be gained more quickly from a short history of England. But from Scott we get a picture not easily forgotten of English life in the stirring times of Elizabeth.

What sort of subjects for themes can we draw from books? When a student is asked to write about a book that has interested him, his natural impulse is simply to "tell the story." That, however, is not an easy task. It is very hard even for a trained writer to put the story of a book containing two hundred or more printed pages into four or five written sheets, and give a satisfactory idea of the original. Let us, then, for the present, exclude from our subjects the summary of an entire book.

The student may, however, derive profit from summarizing an interesting chapter or scene. In a few paragraphs a good idea can be given of the duel between the King and Roderick in The Lady of the Lake, or of Grand Pré as described in Evangeline, or of the last fight of Uncas in The Last of the Mohicans. Another method is for the reader to ask and answer the questions, "What interests me most in that book? Is it the plot? Or one of the characters? Or a description of a scene in the country? Or the ideas the author advances?" Some interesting questions suggested by books may call

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for further reading; for example: "Is the account of Robinson Crusoe's life on his island improbable?" or "Are Longfellow's Indians in Hiawatha true to life?" In the case of narratives a more imaginative kind of subject is also possible. The student may take part in the composition by continuing the story after a certain point is reached, or by constructing a new scene in which the characters of the story appear.

In selecting

9. The Four Kinds of Composition. subjects for themes, the student may be helped by knowing that among the many forms prose composition takes chere are four pretty well defined kinds:

1. Exposition.-We may attempt to give an idea of a machine, or a mechanical process, or the way to train a horse; to tell what we think of a book, and why; to let someone see the merits or defects of student self-government. Compositions of this kind are called expositions. The word comes from the Latin expositio, a "setting forth;" it is roughly equivalent to explanation. Excluding stories, most magazine articles are, in the main, expository; so, too, are many editorials and most text-books. For example, this book is an expository treatment of composition and rhetoric.

2. Argument.-We may attempt to convince others of the truth or falsity of a given statement. Compositions of this kind are called arguments; oral arguments in which two speakers or groups of speakers support opposite sides of a question are called debates. To make any progress toward a decision in a disputed matter, we must first reduce the subject to a definite proposition; e. g., that student self-government should [or should not] be adopted in the high school; that woman's suffrage ought to be adopted in Massachusetts [or any other state]; that football is too rough a game

to be played by high school pupils. We must then explain exactly what the proposition means, tell what we believe about it, and why we believe as we do. Most political speeches and many editorials and magazine articles are argumentative. Obviously, both exposition and argument will often appear in the same article.

3. Description. We may attempt to make a reader or hearer see a certain place or person, or realize how we felt in the face of certain events. So Thackeray tells us, in Vanity Fair, that Captain Macmurdo was "a venerable bristly warrior, with a little close-shaved gray head, with a silk night-cap, a red face and nose, and a great dyed moustache." So Kipling, trying to make us feel the effect of drought in the jungle, says that "the green growths on the sides of the ravines burned up to broken wires and curled films of dead stuff; the hidden pools sank down and caked over, keeping the least footmark on their edges as if it had been cast in iron." So Poe, in The Pit and the Pendulum, seeking to make us realize the sensations of a man just sentenced to death, writes:

The sentence-the dread sentence of death-was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum. It conveyed to my soul the idea of revolution, perhaps from its association in fancy with the burr of a millwheel. This only for a brief period; for presently I heard no more. This we call description. In most cases, description appears as a part of one of the other kinds of composition; but it also exists independently, and we may well practice it because of the simplicity and definiteness of the task.

4. Narrative. Finally, we may attempt to tell something that happened, or that we imagine to have happened. This we call narration. Under narration of fact are included anecdotes, newspaper accounts of the