AN ATTEMPT TO COLLECT
Three times a week the scholars of the “Greenbank Academy” met at the house of Dr. Lanham to receive instruction from Professor Susan, for the school trustees could not agree on a new teacher. Some of the people wanted one thing, and some another; a lady teacher was advocated and opposed; a young man, an old man, a new-fashioned man, an old-fashioned man, and no teacher at all for the rest of the present year, so as to save money, were projects that found advocates. The division of opinion was so great that the plan of no school at all was carried because no other could be. So Susan’s class went on for a month, and grew to be quite a little society, and then it came to an end.
One evening, when the lessons were finished, Professor Susan said: “I am sorry to tell you that this is the last lesson I can give.”
And then they all said “Aw-w-w-w-w!” in a melancholy way.
“I am going away to school myself,” Susan went on. “My father thinks I ought to go to Mr. Niles’s school at Port William.”
“I shouldn’t think you’d need to go any more,” said Joanna Merwin. “I thought you knew everything.”
“Oh, bless me!” cried Susan.
In former days the people of the interior—the Mississippi Valley—which used then to be called “the West,” were very desirous of education for their children. But good teachers were scarce. Ignorant and pretentious men, incompetent wanderers from New England, who had grown tired of clock-peddling, or tin-peddling, and whose whole stock was assurance, besides impostors of other sorts, would get places as teachers because teachers were scarce and there were no tests of fitness. Now and then a retired Presbyterian minister from Scotland or Pennsylvania, or a college graduate from New England, would open a school in some country town. Then people who could afford it would send their children from long distances to board near the school, and learn English grammar, arithmetic, and, in some cases, a little Latin, or, perhaps, to fit themselves for entrance to some of the sturdy little country colleges already growing up in that region. At Port William, in Kentucky, there was at this time an old minister, Mr. Niles, who really knew what he professed to teach, and it was to his school that Dr. Lanham was now about to send Susan; Harvey Collins and Henry Weathervane had already entered the school. But for poor boys like Jack, and Bob Holliday, and Columbus, who had no money with which to pay board, there seemed no chance.
The evening on which Susan’s class broke up, there was a long and anxious discussion between Jack Dudley and his mother.
“You see, Mother, if I could get even two months in Mr. Niles’s school, I could learn some Latin, and if I once get my fingers into Latin, it is like picking bricks out of a pavement; if I once get a start, I can dig it out myself. I am going to try to find some way to attend that school.”