The Tug of War
Before the interest began to flag, it was understood that as a final test, every body in the house should rise and spell down. With blushing honors, under the spell of emulation, this unobtrusive girl would rally her powers, and hold her timid self up to meet all comers by sheer force of a moral courage, unsurpassed by men who go over the top and look into the cannon's mouth. The audience grows breathless. She clings to her position like that which Oliver Wendell Holmes called The Last Leaf. Our best girl won. Our boys seeing any members of the defeated school would use their two palms for a trumpet and shout the pivotal word, on which our victory turned, "Phthisic." It was a great incitement to strive to equal or excel when a rival was seen to take a reward for doing what we might have done, but didn't. The name of the winner became a household word and was garlanded. I have felt depressed by my consciousness of the unworthiness of the response, that my life has made, to such an excellent instructor in penmanship and spelling. His name is embalmed in all our hearts. The terms of school soon ended. Beyond this we have no record of our eminent teacher's life and as Bunyan says of one of his characters "We saw him no more."
CHAPTER VI
WHERE WE PLAYED MUMBLE-THE-PEG
It is with diffidence that I name a suggestion that has been very much on my heart since retreading these streets and revisiting these early haunts. It is to get rich, not with dollars in the purse, but deposits in the bank of memory. No other human faculty can be more rapidly and strongly and surely developed than an ability to keep things in mind. Yet many people are making use of methods that impoverish recollection. Devices are increasing for memory-saving which have the effect of memory destroying. A faculty's development is arrested from want of use. The memory has not grown, but the habit of putting things down with a pencil has developed. Our schedule of work is not unfolded in the mind and committed to memory but is committed to little slips of paper. Things are not carried in the brain but in the pocket and are in danger of being laid off with one's apparel. We feel dependent on the memoranda. Our best power, that likes to be trusted, that responds to discipline, has no growth, but wastes away instead, owing to defective nutrition, and lack of exercise. The memory falls into a stunted and partially disabled condition. That minister, the most widely read of any American clergyman, sharply points out, that a capacity falling into disuse, falls also into a dying process, and is extirpated and withdrawn. Any capacity kept under, allowed no range or play, suppressed, is soon stupefied and blunted. A man was endowed with a fine faculty, and has not turned it to account, "Take, therefore, the talent from him."
Developing a Real and Fixed Deformity
We once had to remember our errands but parents now hand to children a written list. Facts, stories, incidents are not stored in the intellect, but in a cabinet. Mental equipment, then, is all gone in the event of a fire. Instead of being thankful that the cabinet maker was preserved it would have been better to have saved the cabinet. There is more in that than in him.
In the intemperate man the better parts of his nature do not have fair play. His body is disordered, his brain confused, by a succession of trespasses. All diseases and abuses are self limited. Improvement would come, by a delivery from his baneful habit, and by strengthening his principles. Memory when respected, when it uses its wings and makes nothing of time or distance is an angel power. It is full of rural incidents and has a great deal of nature and of soul in it. The past is not altogether dead. It must be used to enable us to understand the real living history around us. Now look. Do you observe that every child has a health instinct? Intuitively it seeks the open air. A child is not fussy about the weather. Those have the best health that go out under all skies. Take notice that a child's birthright is freedom. When walking with his mother he seeks to unclasp his hand from hers and make a little detour in the grass along the way. His nature revolts at following, forever, when out for pleasure, a beaten path. Seeing real life reflected, you do not fail to notice, that in coasting, which in childhood could be called, The Great Joy, the girls take a prominent part, and there is no effort by the elders to play the spy nor block the sport. Here are boys and girls together, oblivious of sex, like a family, in beautiful, healthful, animating sport. It is remarkable that coasting keeps first place, seeing that it involves climbing up as well as sliding down. The return walk, involving a change of position, an interchange of mind, a fine spirit of comradeship, a greatly increased intake of ozone became for a fact a cordial of incredible virtue. God sets all little children playing for this. He lays the necessity of play upon them, and the restless little fellows hunger and thirst for physical activities. On a holiday the city is emptied into the country to enjoy for a few hours the true conditions of a healthy physical condition.