And then if you were going to read law with Mr. Parker, or study medicine with old Doc. Harbaugh, and you kind of run out of clothes, you took that certificate and hunted up a school and taught it. Sometimes they paid you as high as $20 a month and board, lots of board, real buckwheat cakes (“riz” buckwheat, not the prepared kind), and real maple syrup, and real sausage, the kind that has sage in it; the kind that you can't coax your butcher to sell you. The pale, tasteless stuff he gives you for sausage I wouldn't throw out to the chickens. Twenty dollars a month and board! That's $4 a month more than a hired man gets.
But it wasn't alone the demonstration that, strange as it might seem, it was possible for a man to get his living by his wits (though that has done much to produce great men) as it was the actual exercise of teaching. Remember the big boys on the back seats, where the apple-cores and the spit-balls come from. The school-director that hired you gave you a searching look-over and said: “M-well-l-l, I'm afraid you haint hardly qualified for our school—oh, that's all right, sir; that's all right. Your 'stiff-kit' is first-rate, and you got good recommends, good recommends; but I was thinkin'—well, I tell you. Might's well out with it first as last. I d' know's I ort to say so, but this here district No. 34 is a poot' tol'able hard school to teach. Ya-uss. A poot-ty tol'able hard school to teach. Now, that's jist the plumb facts in the matter. We've had four try it this winter a'ready. One of 'em stuck it out four weeks—I jimminy! he had grit, that feller had. The balance of 'em didn't take so long to make up their minds. Well, now, if you're a mind to try it—I was goin' to say you didn't look to me like you had the heft. Like to have you the worst way. Now, if you want to back out.... Well, all right. Monday mornin', eh? Well, you got my sympathies.”
I believe that some have tried to figure out that St. Martin of Tours, ought to be the patron saint of the United States. One of his feast-days falls on July 4, and his colors are red, white and blue. But I rather prefer, myself, the Boanerges, the two sons of Zebedee. When asked: “Are ye able to drink of this cup?” they answered: “We are able.” They didn't in the least know what it was; but they knew they were able for anything that anybody else was, and, perhaps, able for a little more. At any rate, they were willing to chance it. That's the United States of America, clear to the bone and back again to the skin.
You ask any really great man: “Have you ever taught a winter term in a country school?” If he says he hasn't, then depend upon it he isn't a really great man. People only think he is. The winter term breeds Boanerges—sons of thunder. Yes, and of lightning, too. Something struck the big boys in the back seats, as sure as you're a foot high; and if it wasn't lightning, what was it? Brute strength for brute strength, they were more than a match for Teacher. It was up to him. It was either prove himself the superior power, or slink off home and crawl under the porch.
The curriculum of the Old Red School-house, which was, until lately, the universal curriculum, consisted in reading, writing, and arithmetic or ciphering. I like the word “ciphering,” because it makes me think of slates—slates that were always falling on the floor with a rousing clatter, so that almost always at least one corner was cracked. Some mitigation of the noise was gained by binding the frame with strips of red flannel, thus adding warmth and brightness to the color scheme. Just as some fertile brain conceived the notion of applying a knob of rubber to each corner, slates went out, and I suppose only doctors buy them nowadays to hang on the doors of their offices. Maybe the teacher's nerves were too highly strung to endure the squeaking of gritty pencils, but I think the real reason for their banishment is, that slates invited too strongly the game of noughts and crosses, or tit-tat-toe, three in a row, the champion of indoor sports, and one entirely inimical to the study of the joggerfy lesson. But if slates favored tit-tat-toe, they also favored ciphering, and nothing but good can come from that. Paper is now so cheap that you need not rub out mistakes, but paper and pencil can never surely ground one in “the science of numbers and the art of computing by them.” What is written is written, and returns to plague the memory, but if you made a mistake on the slate, you could spit on it and rub it out with your sleeve and leave no trace of the error, either on the writing surface or the tables of the memory. What does the hymn say?
“Forget the steps already trod,
And onward urge thy way.”
The girls used to keep a little sponge and some water in a discarded patchouli bottle with a glass stopper, to wash their slates with; but it always seemed to me that the human and whole-hearted way was otherwise.
Reading, writing, and arithmetic,—these three; and the greatest of these three is arithmetic. Over against it stands grammar, which may be said to be derived from reading and writing. Show me a man that, as a boy at school, excelled in arithmetic and I will show you a useful citizen, a boss in his own business, a leader of men; show me the boy that preferred grammar, that read expressively, that wrote a beautiful hand and curled his capital S's till their tails looked like mainsprings, and I will show you a dreamer and a sentimentalist—a man that works for other people. While I have breath in me, I will maintain the supereminence of arithmetic. There is no room for disputation in arithmetic, no exceptions to the rule. Twice two is four, and that's all there is about it: but whether there be pronunciations, they shall cease; whether there be rules of grammar, they shall vanish away. Why, look here. It's a rule of grammar, isn't it, that the subject of a sentence must be put in the nominative case? Let it kick and bite, and hang on to the desks all it wants to, in it goes and the door is slammed on it. You think so? What is the word “you?” Second person, plural number, objective case. Oh, no; the nominative form is “ye.”
Don't you remember it says: “Woe unto you, ye lawyers”? Those who fight against: “Him and me went down town,” fight against the stars in their courses, for the objective case in every language is bound and determined to be The Whole Thing. Arithmetic alone is founded on a rock. All else is fleeting, all else is futile, chaotic—a waste of time. What is reading but a rival of morphine? There are probably as many men in prison, sent there by Reading, as by Rum.
“Oh, not good Reading!” says the publisher.