“The master was expected to live with the parents of his pupils, regulating the length of his stay by the number of the boys in the family attending his school. Thus it happened that in the course of his teaching he became an inmate of all the houses of the district, and was not seldom forced to walk five miles, in the worst of weather over the worst of roads, to his school.
“Yet, mendicant though he was, it would be a great mistake to suppose that he was not always a welcome guest. He slept in the best room, sat in the warmest nook by the fire, and had the best food set before him at the table. In the long winter evenings he helped the boys with their lessons, held yarn for the daughters, or escorted them to spinning matches and quiltings. In return for his miserable pittance and his board, the young student taught what would now be considered as the rudiments of an education. His daily labors were confined to teaching his scholars to read with a moderate degree of fluency, to write legibly, to spell with some regard for the rules of orthography, and to know as much of arithmetic as would enable them to calculate the interest on a debt, to keep the family accounts, and to make change in a shop.
“Nor was this making change a simple matter. Fifty years ago the silver pieces which passed from hand to hand, under the name of small change, were largely made up of foreign coins. They had been in circulation long before the war for independence, had seen much service, and were none the better for the wear and tear they had sustained.
“One of these pieces was known as the four-pence, but passed for six and a quarter cents if, as the result of long hoarding, the inscription was legible, and the stamp easy to make out; but when worn smooth—and the four-pence pieces generally were worn smooth and crossed—no one would take them for more than five cents. A larger coin was the nine-pence, which passed for twelve and a half cents. The pistareen was worth twenty cents. The picayune, a term rarely used north of Mason and Dixon’s line, went for six and a quarter cents. But the confusion was yet more increased by the language which merchants used to express the price of their goods.
“The value of the gold pieces expressed in dollars was pretty much the same the country over. But the dollar, and the silver pieces regarded as fractions of a dollar, had no less than five different values. In New England and Virginia a merchant who spoke of a dollar was understood to mean six shillings, or one hundred and eight coppers; but the same merchant would, the moment he set foot in North Carolina or New York, be content with demanding ninety-six coppers, or eight shillings, as the equivalent of a dollar. Sixpence in Massachusetts meant eight and a third cents; a shilling meant sixteen and two-third cents; two-and-three pence was thirty-seven and a half cents; three shillings was fifty cents; four-and-six was seventy five cents; nine shillings was a dollar and a half.”
About all these to us strange coins and values the schoolmaster was expected to know, and to be able also to instruct his scholars. He filled, therefore, a very important place in the life of the village, as well as in the experience of the boys under his instruction. Nowhere to-day can you find in village schoolmaster, district or town school teacher, superintendent of instruction, or learned professor, a figure that fills out and continues just the portrait of the typical pedagogue of a generation or more ago.
Next after the village schoolmaster, and perhaps outranking him in prominence and in distinctive traits, and so deserving to have been mentioned sooner, was the “Country Doctor” of the past generation.
Wherever men live, meet with accidents, suffer sickness, grow old and die, there in civilized lands the physician is a necessity, and is always to be found. Favored as we are in the present by all the progress in medical and sanitary science, and attended by the skilled physicians of to-day, we can hardly realize the life of the doctor and of the patient in the time many of the remedies which are now used to relieve pain were unknown, when there were no drug stores except in the larger towns, when only a few simple medicines could be easily obtained at the village store, along with the tea, sugar, calico, twine and garden seeds that made up the stock on the shelves. Then the physician compounded his own drugs, rolled out his own pills, made his own tinctures, weighed or measured out his own prescriptions, and carried with him on his round of calls, and perhaps in his saddle-bags, a most varied and astonishing assortment of medicines, a list of which would be remarkable to-day, alike for the presence of many that are abandoned, and for the absence of still more that are now in common and constant use.
The physician of to-day excels him perhaps in general knowledge, in ability to deal with difficult diseases, and to perform delicate and successful surgery. He is the man of wider reading and more scientific views; he is possibly the better practitioner; but he is by no means the distinct character in his way that the country doctor of fifty years ago was.
“His genial face, his engaging manners, his hearty laugh, the twinkle in his eye, the sincerity with which he asked after the health of the carpenter’s daughter, the interest he took in the family of the poorest laborer, the good nature with which he stopped to chat with the farm hands about the prospect of the corn crops and the turnip crops, made him the favorite for miles around. When he rode out he knew the names and personal history of the occupants of every house he passed. The farmers’ lads pulled off their hats, and the girls dropped courtesies to him. Sunshine and rain, daylight and darkness were alike to him. He would ride ten miles on the darkest night, over the worst roads, in a pelting storm, to administer a dose of calomel to an old woman, or to attend a child in a fit. He was present at every birth; he attended every burial; he sat with the minister at every death-bed, and put his name with the lawyer to every will.”