She moistens and removes the ashes and sweeps the hearth and the kitchen floor."
These explanations should be as short and crisp as is compatible with the object in view, viz.:—to create a clear mental picture in the minds of the pupils of the actions to be described in the Irish lesson.
Grammar.
The teacher who follows the foregoing instructions will, in the course of twenty or thirty lessons, have taught a considerable amount of the most essential and practical parts of grammar. He will have taught his pupils to say things, and to say correctly, what they want to say. That I take to be the chief aim of grammar. As he proceeds, however, he will find it advantageous to systematise the pupils' knowledge of grammar. He will point out to them the difference in certain of the terminations of two classes of verbs, so that they will be able, even in the case of a verb taught to them for the first time, to give the correct future or conditional. The pupil will have observed at an early stage the curious phenomena of aspiration and eclipses, and the teacher will be forced, from time to time, to refer to these phenomena and give some explanation. After he has allowed the pupils to become familiar with them in practice he should at some stage, in a half hour's instruction, intimate briefly how, say, aspiration grew in the language and the laws that govern it. The same with reference to eclipses. He need not attempt to lay down the whole of the rules at once, but should revert to the subject as instances occur in the lessons.
