Elbow-Room: A Novel Without a Plot

by Charles Heber Clark

And the judge picked up his paper and resumed the editorial on "The
Impending Crisis."

They obtained a good teacher, however, and the course of affairs in the girls' department was smooth enough; but just after the opening of the fall session there was some trouble in the boys' department.

Mr. Barnes, the master, read in the Educational Monthly that boys could be taught history better than in any other way by letting each boy in the class represent some historical character, and relate the acts of that character as if he had done them himself. This struck Barnes as a mighty good idea, and he resolved to put it in practice. The school had then progressed so far in its study of the history of Rome as the Punic wars, and Mr. Barnes immediately divided the boys into two parties, one Romans and the other Carthaginians, and certain of the boys were named after the leaders upon both sides. All the boys thought it was a fine thing, and Barnes noticed that they were so anxious to get to the history lesson that they could hardly say their other lessons properly.

When the time came, Barnes ranged the Romans upon one side of the room and the Carthaginians on the other. The recitation was very spirited, each party telling about its deeds with extraordinary unction. After a while Barnes asked a Roman to describe the battle of Cannæ. Whereupon the Romans hurled their copies of Wayland's Moral Science at the enemy. Then the Carthaginians made a battering-ram out of a bench and jammed it among the Romans, who retaliated with a volley of books, slates and chewed paper-balls. Barnes concluded that the battle of Cannæ had been sufficiently illustrated, and he tried to stop it; but the warriors considered it too good a thing to let drop, and accordingly the Carthaginians dashed over to the Romans with another battering-ram and thumped a couple of them savagely.

Then the Romans turned in, and the fight became general. A Carthaginian would grasp a Roman by the hair and hustle him around over the desk in a manner that was simply frightful, and a Roman would give a fiendish whoop and knock a Carthaginian over the head with Greenleaf's Arithmetic. Hannibal got the head of Scipio Africanus under his arm, and Scipio, in his efforts to break away, stumbled, and the two generals fell and had a rough-and-tumble fight under the blackboard. Caius Gracchus prodded Hamilcar with a ruler, and the latter in his struggles to get loose fell against the stove and knocked down about thirty feet of stove-pipe. Thereupon the Romans made a grand rally, and in five minutes they chased the entire Carthaginian army out of the school-room, and Barnes along with it; and then they locked the door and began to hunt up the apples and lunch in the desks of the enemy.

[Illustration: THE BATTLE OF CANNÆ.]

After consuming the supplies they went to the windows and made disagreeable remarks to the Carthaginians, who were standing in the yard, and dared old Barnes to bring the foe once more into battle array. Then Barnes went for a policeman; and when he knocked at the door, it was opened, and all the Romans were found busy studying their lessons. When Barnes came in with the defeated troops he went for Scipio Africanus; and pulling him out of his seat by the ear, he thrashed that great military genius with a rattan until Scipio began to cry, whereupon Barnes dropped him and began to paddle Caius Gracchus. Then things settled down in the old way, and next morning Barnes announced that history in the future would be studied as it always had been; and he wrote a note to the Educational Monthly to say that in his opinion the man who suggested the new system ought to be led out and shot. The boys do not now take as much interest in Roman history as they did on that day.

* * * * *

The young tragedian who represented Scipio Africanus is named Smith. His family came to the village to live only a few weeks before the school opened. Scipio is a very enterprising and ingenious lad. Colonel Coffin's boy leaned over the fence one day and gave to me his impressions of Scipio, a lad about fourteen years old:

"Yes, me and him are right well acquainted now; he knows more'n I do, and he's had more experience. Bill says his father used to be a robber (Smith, by the way, is a deacon in the Presbyterian church, and a very excellent lawyer), and that he has ten million dollars in gold buried in his cellar, along with a whole lot of human bones—people he's killed. And he says his father is a conjurer, and that he makes all the earthquakes that happen anywheres in the world. The old man'll come home at night, after there's been an earthquake, all covered with perspiration and so tired he kin hardly stand. Bill says it's such hard work.