A Busy Year at the Old Squire's

by C. A. Stephens

Cousin Addison drove to the village with horse and pung to fetch him; and the pung, I remember, was filled with the master's belongings, including his school melodeon, books and seven large wall maps for teaching geography. For Master Pierson brought a complete outfit, even to the stack of school song-books which later were piled on the top of the melodeon that stood in front of the teacher's desk at the schoolhouse. Every space between the windows was covered by those wall maps. No other teacher had ever made the old schoolhouse so attractive. No other teacher had ever entered on the task of giving us instruction with such zeal and such enthusiasm. It was a zeal, too, and an enthusiasm which embraced every pupil in the room and stopped at nothing short of enlisting that pupil's best efforts to learn.

Master Pierson put life and hard work into everything that went on at school—even into the old schoolhouse itself. Every morning he would be off from the old Squire's at eight o'clock, to see that the schoolhouse was well warmed and ready to begin lessons at nine; and if there had been any neglect in sweeping or dusting, he would do it himself, and have every desk and bench clean and tidy before school time.

What was more, Master Pierson possessed the rare faculty of communicating his own zeal for learning to his pupils. We became so interested, as weeks passed, that of our own accord we brought our school books home with us at night, in order to study evenings; and we asked for longer lessons that we might progress faster.

My cousin Halstead was one of those boys (and their name is Legion) who dislike study and complain of their lessons that they are too long and too hard. But strange to say, Master Joel Pierson somehow led Halse to really like geography that winter. Those large wall maps in color were of great assistance to us all. In class we took turns going to them with a long pointer, to recite the lesson of the day. I remember just how the different countries looked and how they were bounded—though many of these boundaries are now, of course, considerably changed.

When lessons dragged and dullness settled on the room, Master Joel was wont to cry, "Halt!" then sit down at the melodeon and play some school song as lively as the instrument admitted of, and set us all singing for five or ten minutes, chanting the multiplication tables, the names of the states, the largest cities of the country, or even the Books of the Bible. At other times he would throw open the windows and set us shouting Patrick Henry's speech, or Byron's Apostrophe to the Ocean. In short, "old Joel" was what now would be called a "live wire." He was twenty-two then and a student working his own way through Bates College. After graduating he migrated to a far western state where he taught for a year or two, became supervisor of schools, then State Superintendent, and afterwards a Representative to Congress. He is an aged man now and no word of mine can add much to the honors which have worthily crowned his life. None the less I want to pay this tribute to him—even if he did rub my ears at times and cry, "Wake up, Round-head! Wake up and find out what you are in this world for." (More rubs!) "You don't seem to know yet. Wake up and find out about it. We have all come into the world to do something. Wake up and find out what you are here for!"—and then more rubs!

It wasn't his fault if I never fairly waked up to my vocation—if I really had one. For the life of me I could never feel sure what I was for! Cousin Addison seemed to know just what he was going to do, from earliest boyhood, and went straight to it. Much the same way, cousin Theodora's warm, generous heart led her directly to that labor of love which she has so faithfully performed. As for Halstead, he was perfectly sure, cock-sure, more than twenty times, what he was going to do in life; but always in the course of a few weeks or months, he discovered he was on the wrong trail. What can be said of us who either have no vocation at all, or too many? What are we here for?

In addition to our daily studies at the schoolhouse, we resumed Latin, in the old sitting-room, evenings, Thomas and Catherine Edwards coming over across the field to join us. To save her carpet, grandmother Ruth put down burlap to bear the brunt of our many restless feet—for there was a great deal of trampling and sometimes outbreaks of scuffling there.

Thomas and I, who had forgotten much we had learned the previous winter, were still delving in Æsop's Fables. But Addison, Theodora and Catherine were going on with the first book of Cæsar's Gallic War. Ellen, two years younger, was still occupied wholly by her English studies. Study hours were from seven till ten, with interludes for apples and pop-corn.

Halstead, who had now definitely abandoned Latin as something which would never do him any good, took up Comstock's Natural Philosophy, or made a feint of doing so, in order to have something of his own that was different from the rest of us. Natural philosophy, he declared, was far and away more important than Latin.

Memory goes back very fondly to those evenings in the old sitting-room, they were so illumined by great hopes ahead. Thomas and I, at a light-stand apart from the others, were usually puzzling out a Fable—The Lion, The Oxen, The Kid and the Wolf, The Fox and the Lion, or some one of a dozen others—holding noisy arguments over it till Master Pierson from the large center table, called out, "Less noise over there among those Latin infants! Cæsar is building his bridge over the Rhine. You are disturbing him."