The Natural History of the Pine-tree. — How it is Converted into Lumber, what it is Worth, and how it is Consumed. — Where the Students get Information. — Working Drawings of the Lesson. — Asking Questions. — The Instructor Executes the Lesson. — Instruction in the Use and Care of Tools. — Twenty-four Boys Making Things. — As Busy as Bees. — The Music of the Laboratory. — The Self-reliance of the Students.

Passing from the Drawing-Room down a flight of stairs we enter the Carpenter’s Laboratory. Here we find twenty-four boys seated before a black-board. At their left stands the instructor with a piece of white pine in his hand. The piece of pine is the subject of his lecture. He frequently breaks the thread of his remarks to ask questions, and he is as frequently interrupted by questions from members of the class. The scene closely resembles an animated discussion, of which a desire to learn by asking questions is the chief characteristic. The discussion is about pine-trees and pine lumber. A pale-faced, city-bred boy rises to describe the pine-tree. He describes a fir-tree, such as may be seen in well-kept urban grounds and parks, and describes it in well-chosen, almost poetic phrase. The instructor shakes his head, but with a genial smile, and recognizes a boy whose face is tanned brown, and who rises at the nod and stands rather awkwardly as he speaks. He has seen the pine in its native wilds, and he describes quite graphically its long, bare trunk and slender limbs. But he says nothing of its narrow, linear leaves, of a dark green color, nor of its woody cones, nor of the Æolian-harp-like sound of the wind in its branches. Why, the instructor wants to know, and he propounds a series of questions, the answers to which afford a brief sketch of the boy’s history. His father is a dealer in pine logs, and once this boy went with him into the pineries of Northern Michigan in mid-winter, when the landscape was white with snow, and there saw the huge trees sway back and forth under the woodman’s axe, saw them topple over, and heard the loud crash of their fall, saw them trimmed and sawed into mill-logs. He took no note of the woody cones, nor of the narrow leaves of the pine, nor did the sound of the wind in its branches make any impression upon his mind. He saw the pine as his father saw it, with the eyes of a lumberman. He learned just one thing, and learned it so well that he is able to tell the story of the pine-tree from the moment of its fall from the stump in the great forest to its arrival at the mill, and thence, cut into boards, planks, and timber, to the raft or schooner bound for Chicago.

Then the different varieties of the pine-tree are enumerated, and the uses to which their woods are severally adapted mentioned. The countries which chiefly produce the pine-tree are named, and the climatic conditions most favorable to its growth briefly referred to. This discussion leads to the subject of commerce in pine lumber—quantity consumed, demand and supply, etc; and this in turn brings a boy to his feet with the statement that at the present rate of consumption the supply of pine in North America will be exhausted in fifty years. In answer to a question the boy says he read the statement in a newspaper. This leads to further inquiry as to the sources of information sought by the members of the class, whereupon it appears that fifteen boys have consulted the title “pine” in some encyclopedia with a view to the present lesson, and that eighteen boys have read the market report under the title “lumber” in a daily journal, in order to learn the value of white-pine boards. The value being stated by half a dozen boys, each member of the class computes the cost of the piece of pine in the hands of the teacher.

Ten minutes having been consumed in the inquiry into the nature and value of the wood in which the lesson of the day is to be wrought, the instructor makes working drawings of the lesson on the black-board. It may consist of a plain joint, a mitre joint, a dove-tail joint, a tenon and mortise, or a frame involving all these, and more manipulations. In the few minutes devoted to this exercise any question that occurs to the mind of the student may be asked, and no impatience is manifested or felt if the questions are numerous and reiterated. But as a matter-of-fact very few questions are asked during the black-board exercise, because each student, having gone over every step of it in his drawing-class the day previous, is perfectly familiar with the subject.

The instructor now quits the black-board for the bench, where, in the presence of the whole class, he executes the difficult parts of the lesson, still propounding and answering questions. If a new tool is brought into requisition, instruction is given in its care and use. Now the boys repair to their benches, throw off their coats, and seize their tools. In a moment the silence and repose of the recitation-room are exchanged for the noise and activity of the laboratory. A quarter of an hour ago we left twenty-four boys, with bowed heads, making drawings of things; for a quarter of an hour we have listened to a peculiar kind of recitation involving much practical knowledge on the subject of the pine-tree and its product, lumber; now we stand in the presence of twenty-four boys, in twenty-four different attitudes of labor, making things. They are literally as busy as bees, using the square, the saw, the plane, and the chisel; they are, as the journeyman carpenter would say, “getting out stuff for a job.” The coarse, buzzing sound of the cross-cut saw resounds loudly through the room; above this bass note the sharp tenor tone of the rip-saw is heard, and the rasping sound of half a dozen planes throwing off a series of curling pine ribbons comes in as a rude refrain. The faces of the boys are ruddy with the glow of exercise; the pale-faced boy who mistook a fir-tree for a pine will have his revenge on the angular boy from the Michigan pinery, for he is doing a finer piece of work than the other.

In the midst of the harmonious confusion caused by the use of saws, planes, mallets, and chisels, the instructor raps on his desk, and silence is restored; three or four boys stand in a group about the instructor’s desk, the others pause and wipe the perspiration from their brows. It is a picture full of interest—twenty-four boys, with flushed, eager faces, lifting their eyes simultaneously to the face of the instructor, waiting for the hint which is to come, and which is sure in these now active minds to result in a prompt solution of the main problem of the day’s lesson. A similar question from several boys shows the instructor that the lesson has not been made clear; hence the general explanation which follows the call to order. So the work goes on, with now and then an interruption. There is a student trying to fit a tenon into its mortise; he is nervous and impatient; the instructor observes him, foresees a catastrophe, and moves towards his bench. But it is too late! The tenon being forced the mortise splits, and the discomforted student makes a wry face. The instructor approaches with a word of good cheer, but with the warning aphorism that “haste makes waste.” The student’s face flushes, and he chronicles his failure as Huntsman, the inventor of cast-steel, did his, by burying the wreck under a pile of shavings, and commencing, as the lawyers say, de novo. Thus the lesson proceeds “by the usual laboratory methods employed in teaching the sciences;” the class learns the thing to be done by doing it. The students are at their best, because the lesson to be learned compels a close union between the three great powers of man—observation, reflection, and action. No student seeks aid from another, because such a course would be impossible without the knowledge of the whole class. A feeling of self-reliance is thus developed, the disposition to shirk repressed, and a sense of sturdy independence encouraged and promoted.