Tom. Miss White explained what percentage is, that it is a sort of other name for decimal fractions, and the problems can be worked just like common or decimal fractions. Then we work them. That’s all. I’d have been farther, only I got stuck on the eighth problem on page 197. But I finally worked it all right. And now I am just sailing along.
Visitor. Good for you! Good for every one of you! I like the child or the man who solves his problems independently. I had an idea that nowadays teachers did the real work and pupils only copied it. That’s what I’ve been told.
Pupils look bewildered for a second, then, thinking this an attempt at a joke, laugh.
Visitor. When I was a boy, we used to speak pieces on Friday afternoons. I liked best to recite bits of patriotic speeches. Do any of you know Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address? (Most of the class stand.) Bless me! So many!
Miss White. If you would like to hear one of my pupils recite it, choose your orator.
Visitor. I think I’d like to hear this little chap speak those great words of a great man.
George, the boy chosen, comes to the front of the room and recites.
ADDRESS AT THE DEDICATION OF THE GETTYSBURG NATIONAL CEMETERY
Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.