Land where the Pilgrims pried....
On the blackboard were the algebraic emblems and geometric designs belonging to the great boys and girls. Small children who had labored to keep their efforts at learnings distinct, who had used letters for spelling words and numbers for making sums, read upon the board of the assembly hall such dissipated and trivial statements as a - b = 6.
Beyond the lessons of the books and the precepts of the teachers the young moved in the great flow of the body of human knowledge, learning slowly from one another. The fruit of knowledge passed downward perpetually from the older groups, becoming more grotesque as it descended beyond the reach of its accompanying emotions. The bulging piano legs on the chapel platform were with child, pregnant. The Pilgrims were thought of as a prying lot; they were heard of around Thanksgiving Day. A child had once designated his navel as his birthplace. A small child in an upper back room, dressing for a pageant, whispered to another child, “That’s my birthplace.” Word of it was passed about in a whisper; it was doubtless true; there was such a word; it could be found in the spelling book. In the assembly a child looked hard at the pregnant piano leg, trying to distinguish a mark upon it. Another day, and the mark was there, the birthplace.
Luce had learned to read and was passing well into the body of knowledge. The games were a delight, and so too were the calisthenics when one marched on light toes, Theodosia walking first. One day a group gathered on the playground around a crying child that had fallen on the gravel. The teacher assured him that the mishap had not hurt him, that it was but a light scratch, nothing to cry for. The crowd began to spread about.
“What was the matter?” was asked.
“Fell down and scratched his cuticle a little,” the teacher said.
Did she have a cuticle? she wondered. She had never heard anyone say that she had scratched or bruised or torn or maimed her cuticle. She dared not ask.
Numbers became rich designs when they passed beyond the commonplace literalness of addition. A multiplication table was a poem and a song. The numbers, written and viewed, kept personalities within their shapes and evoked colors even after they became parts of tables, the number songs. One, written 1, was whimsical and comical, unserious, too easy to learn and to write. No child could ever take it heavily, for anyone could have invented it. 2 was beyond knowing in its infinity of curves and arcs that melted into an angle and stiffened into a straight line. It had caused tears in the beginning, and even after it became routine its forbidding resistance was not forgotten; it was a cruelty. Nine, uttered, was the cry of a bird. Written 9, it rolled easily from the hand and was a maker of joy. It was the consummation of numbers, the last of its kind, the end of the series. After it the numbers were patched together of those already learned, a poverty of ideas. Its multiplication table was the most beautiful in song with its receding scheme of backward-counting adornments that played through the forward-going lilt of rising quantities.
One day in the assembly the chief professor asked questions, preparing for a day of patriotism. Only the little children might answer.