arithmetic is exact and careful in everything; but his heart seems to me to be cunning, deceitful, suspicious and greedy; he has good health. . . . Maria Bæchli, eight; excessively feeble in intelligence and body. But it will be very very interesting for humanity to see that imbecile children, roughly brought up, who would have had no resource except the madhouse, may be, by affectionate attentions appropriate to their feebleness, saved from this misery, and enabled to secure a modest livelihood and an independent life. . . . Henri Fuchsli, of Brugg, seven; has only been here a few weeks; seems gifted."

The staff is thus described by Pestalozzi: "For the conduct of the establishment and in the interests of the children, I get the most valuable assistance from Mlle. Madelon Spindler, of Strasbourg, who possesses extraordinary ability and astonishing activity. I have, besides, a master for weaving, and two experienced weavers; a mistress for spinning, and two young women spinners; a man who with the work of winding combines the teaching of elementary reading, as well as two menials and two women-servants almost wholly occupied in farm-work."

In spite of all his hopes and efforts Pestalozzi's unpractical nature again betrayed him, and financial difficulties once more assailed him. He tried to find a remedy for this by considerably increasing the number of children; but this only increased the evil. Parents who were themselves common beggars complained most bitterly against him, and persuaded their children to run away-so that they might enjoy the earnings that the training and skill they got from Pestalozzi would enable them to obtain-but not before they had got a

new suit of clothes at the institution. Untrue and unfair reports were circulated, came to the ears of subscribers, and led to the falling off of subscriptions. And all this whilst Pestalozzi continued to admit children who arrived covered with rags and vermin, whom he made clean and comfortable; he himself partaking of the same kind of food as they had, except that he gave them the best potatoes whilst keeping the worst for himself.

"Every Sunday," he says, "my house was filled with parents, who finding that the position of their children did not answer to their expectations, and as though to encourage them in their discontent, treated me with all the arrogance which a horde of brutish mendicants can allow themselves in an establishment which enjoyed neither official support nor imposing exterior."

Still Pestalozzi struggled on, battling with ill-health and worse fortune, but nobly encouraged and supported by his faithful wife. When too late he called in the help of able and experienced men. But matters were past mending, and after two years of painful perseverance, when husband and wife had spent their last strength and their last shilling, the end came. The establishment

Pestalozzi, though still the owner of house and farm, was, in effect, as poor as the beggars for whom he had beggared himself. Again his friends and relations came to his rescue and kept his home together. But his wife's bad health, and his own exhausted condition, left them incapable of helping themselves, and soon they were without food, fuel, or money, and suffering from cold and

want.

Their sad condition called forth an act of heroic de

votion on the part of a domestic servant, Elizabeth Naef, of Kappel, who knew Pestalozzi through having been in the service of one of his relatives. When she heard of their distress she straightway went to Neuhof and insisted upon succouring them. Pestalozzi tried hard to dissuade her from sharing their sufferings, but she would not be denied. She set the house in order, put the garden straight, cultivated a small plot of land, and by good management and incessant labour kept the wolf from the door. Well might Pestalozzi take her as his model for the noble Gertrude.

Nearly twenty years after he thus wrote of his aims and his work for the children at Neuhof: "The thing was not that they should know what they did not know, but that they should behave as they did not behave... I lived for years together in a circle of more than fifty pauper children; in poverty did I share my bread with them, and lived myself like a pauper, to try if I could teach paupers to live as men. The plan which I had formed for their education embraced agriculture, manufacture and commerce. In no one of the three departments did I possess any practical ability for the management of details, nor was my mind cast to keep up persevering attention to little things; and in an isolated position, with limited means, I was unable to procure such assistance as might have made up for my own deficiencies. In a short time I was surrounded with embarrassments and saw the great object of my wishes defeated. In the struggle, however, in which this attempt involved me, I had learned a vast deal of truth, and I was never more fully convinced of the importance of my views and plans than at the moment when they seemed to be for ever set at rest by a total failure.

Before I was aware of it I was deeply involved in debt, and the greater part of my dear wife's property and expectations had in an instant, as it were, gone up in smoke. . .

"Difficulties might gradually have been more or less overcome if I had not sought to carry out my experiment on a scale that was quite disproportioned to my strength, and had I not with almost incredible thoughtlessness wanted to convert it, in the very beginning, into an undertaking which presupposed a thorough knowledge of manufactures, men and business, in which I was deficient in the same proportion as they were rendered necessary to me by the direction which I now gave to my undertaking.

"I, who so much disapproved of hurrying to the higher stages of instruction before a thorough foundation had been laid in the elementary steps of the lower stages, and looked upon it as the fundamental error in the education of the day, and who also believed that I was myself endeavouring with all my might to counteract it in my plan of education, allowed myself to be carried away by illusions of the greater remunerativeness of the higher branches of industry, without knowing even remotely either them or the means of learning and introducing them, and to commit the very faults in teaching my schoolchildren spinning and weaving. . . . I wanted to have the finest thread spun before my children had gained any steadiness or sureness of hand in spinning even the coarser kinds, and, in like manner, to make muslin fabrics before my weavers had acquired sufficient steadiness and readiness in the weaving of common cotton goods."

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But there was no total failure" in the matter, for over a hundred children had been rescued from ignorance

and poverty and degradation; and Pestalozzi rightly claimed that: "I have proved that children after having lost health, strength and courage in a life of idleness and mendicity have, when once set to regular work, quickly recovered their health and spirits and grown rapidly. I have found that when taken out of their abject condition they soon became kindly, trustful and sympathetic; that even the most degraded of them are touched by kindness, and that the eyes of the child who has been steeped in misery grow bright with pleasure and surprise when, after years of hardship, he sees a gentle friendly hand stretched out to help him; and I am convinced that when a child's heart has been touched the consequences will be great for his development and entire moral character. . . . It gives me indescribable pleasure to see young children, boys and girls, formerly miserable little creatures, grow and develop, to see contentment depicted on their faces, to teach their hands to work, to raise their souls to their Creator, to see the tears of innocence in prayer shine in the eyes of beloved children, and to discern the glimmering of hope, of sentiments, and morals, worthy of the young, in a degraded and abandoned race. It is joy and happiness beyond description to see human beings, the image of their Almighty Creator, grow up in so many forms and with such different gifts, and then perhaps to discover, where no one expected it, in the miserable and abandoned son of the poorest artisan, a great spirit, a genius to be saved."

Now followed evil days for Pestalozzi. His land was let to satisfy his creditors, though he was allowed to remain in the house. "His situation was frightful. Frequently in his only too elegant country house he