One night when the conversation had become unusually absorbing they stopped and, looking up, found they had halted before the Model School Building,—which corresponds to an American college. The subject of acquiring an education had often engaged them before, but now ideas came to a focus.
"I have a calf, and some carpenter's tools," said one young man, addressing Mr. Carr earnestly; "I will sell them, and buy clothes and books if you will teach me."
Without hesitation the minister cried, "Come on."
"May we come too?" chorused the others.
"Yes!" Little did they realize how much that consent meant; how much of energy, of which there was no surplus; how much of nerve-drain and anxious thought. A number of young men decided to come to Barclay Terrace every day. They came and Mr. Carr gave them the same course he had taken at Kentucky University. This was, indeed, paying back to the world with interest, the good that the world had bestowed! When Eneas Myall carried to Carr's tavern the money that started Oliver Carr on his road to the University, little did he dream of the beneficent influences he was setting in motion on the other side of the globe! It is so with every good deed. One never sows a word of love beneath the northern skies, but he may find it blooming some day, beneath the Southern Cross.
Mr. Carr's boys had studied some—not much—at the public school. They knew something of English grammar; he did not teach it to them; he taught Greek grammar, and it is needless to say that they became good grammarians. They read the New Testament in Greek. They were taught rhetoric and logic from Mr. Carr's notes, taken at the University. Among the class was that T. H. Rix, who is today a successful evangelist. Another—he who sold his calf and tools to buy books,—stands today as the best educated man in the Church of Christ, in Australia, next to T. J. Gore. He is G. B. Moysey. Who will say he would better have kept his calf?
Thus we find O. A. Carr becomes a schoolteacher, though his purposes were all set otherwise. It seemed forced upon him by his consciousness of the good he might do. We are to find the same thing occurring again and again in his life. Duty seemed ever calling him to the desk when his own heart yearned for the pulpit. As yet he was able—both to preach and teach with all his might. Unfortunately that might was not based upon physical resources.
On the other hand, Mrs. Carr must always teach, wherever she was, because teaching was a part of her being. She had opened a class for young ladies in her home. Her accommodations compelled her to limit the number of pupils to about twenty; but, on account of this limitation, she was enabled to select those girls who were most refined, and who promised the best spiritual reward for her labors. This was her second school; and while it was by no means so pretentious as her college at Lancaster, the results were doubtless more far-reaching.
Her system of education,—indeed, her conception of education—differed materially from that found in Melbourne. If her method seemed radical to the most conservative, it filled with delight those open to impressions of new truth. Mrs. Carr's scheme to educate a girl was not to fill her with facts, but to develop her mind and heart. This has not always been understood by those who patronized her various schools. The commonplace test of "how much a pupil knows," did not always apply to her classes. She took pains to teach them how to preserve their health, how to deport themselves, how to preserve their modesty and integrity, how to become forces in the world.