Can a person change his disposition? The features of children are as diverse as their faces, all have the family likeness, but each has his own peculiar temperament.
Is it the brain, and not the soul, that does the thinking? Is man a machine and not a living spirit, inhabiting a physical body? Do people speak advisedly who use the expression "Keeping soul and body together?"
Why did not the slaves in the South do more for their own emancipation?
Why does a minister use a text? This custom prevails among pulpit orators who do not believe in miracles or in the inspiration of the Scripture or in the authority of the Bible. There's a reason. What is it?
Our teachers, in faithfulness and friendship, used to stand next to our parents and are entitled to and will ever receive our most grateful recollections. They are happy men whose natures sort with their vocations. On revisiting the earth there was one instructor who beside exercising a benign and stimulating personal influence had high qualities and remarkable fitness for his noble profession, whom I would cheerfully make a sabbath day's journey to honor. Let me preserve his name, S. H. Folsom. Schoolmaster was about the right word for him for he was master as well as teacher. His severity is to be attributed to the times rather than to him. It is said that a drowning man can in two minutes live over again every incident in a long and checkered career, and a boy does not doubt the possibility of such phenomena, if he has been publicly requested, by the master, to remain after school to be whipped. We all remember him with kindly feelings and there are hundreds of his pupils living who have not lost their sense of indebtedness to him.
On the Road to Learning
A boy lays up nothing against a noble, faithful, patient teacher who whips him. Pain is nothing to boys. They give it, and suffer it, in their sports, many of which have penalties. They uplift tearful eyes, but it is in entreaty, and not in rage. It was from him I acquired a life-long practice of the little economies of time. We are now so interlocked with others, we are so far from living or laboring alone that our time is much disposed of by other people. "Do you ever reflect how you pass your life? If you live to seventy-two, which I hope you may, your life is passed in the following manner: an hour a day is three years. This makes twenty-seven years sleeping, nine years dressing, nine years at table, six years playing with children, nine years walking, drawing, and visiting, six years shopping, and three years quarrelling."
I now save the time I used to spend in going to the postoffice. I used to reckon how many trips would make twenty miles. Still the flight of time grieves me. I must draw tighter and tighter every string. The school that I attended was a mere vest-pocket edition of the one which, year by year, like a starling, keeps adding to the nest, on which Mr. Folsom now looks down in benediction. This building has a telephone switchboard. I recognized only the switch which in my day was a weeping willow. When a gone feeling was experienced, a boy could dig up a small coin, go to a grocery and buy a pickle, but now schools have a buffet car attachment supplied by the woman's club.
The By-product of Development
It was an unrealized deprivation, but I do not seem to remember, when I was under the ferule, the teacher's maid, such as waits upon the children at the new training school here, nor do I seem to recall the school physician, such as the city now elects, nor the piano, nor the victrola, nor do I remember any free transportation to and from school except by "punging" when we had to take what came in terms of the sleigh driver's whip.