"Yes," said young Willard, as his head emerged from the drift, looking like an animated snow-ball, "and I would have reached there, too, if I hadn't slipped."
This was all that was said, at the time, but as Mr. Carter led his prisoner back, an explanation took place, in which the lad so strongly insisted that his escapade arose from a sense of the gross injustice done him, that Carter's own sense of right was touched, and after admonishing the boy to take a different mode of redressing his grievances in the future, he agreed to forego the flogging and let Master Willard finish the remainder of the session in the customary way.
After this occurrence, Willard got along very well under the tuition of Mr. Carter, and it was not until some years later, when a gentleman by the name of Nichols took charge of the school, that anything transpired worthy of note.
James Nichols was a devout believer in Solomon's maxim that to spare the rod is to spoil the child. The whip was his arbiter in all differences which arose between his pupils and himself. He never paused, as Mr. Montieth has lately done, to consider that at least two-thirds of the offences for which children are flogged at school are "crimes for which they are in nowise responsible," and "when stripped of the color given to them by senseless and unmeaning rules, they are simply the crimes of being a boy and being a girl," and are "incited by bad air, cold feet, overwork and long confinement; crimes which the parents of these same children are accustomed to excuse in themselves, when they sit in church, by the dulness of the sermon, or other circumstances that offend against nature and which they sometimes soothe with fennel or hartshorn, or change of position, and not unseldom with sleep." In school discipline Mr. Nichols was a pure materialist. He never realized Cayley's profound lesson that "education is not the mere storing a youthful memory with a bundle of facts which it neither digests nor assimilates," but that it is the formation and training of a mind. Under his régime the rod ruled everything. Even the offence of whispering was punished by the lash.
Upon one occasion, when young Willard was seated between two brothers—Henry and Brayton Abbott by name—engaged in solving Algebraic problems, a whispered inquiry, regarding the lesson, passed from one to the other.
Mr. Nichols at the moment happened to glance towards them, and conjectured, by the movement of Willard's lips, that he was violating the rule against whispering.
"Willard Glazier!" said he, angrily, "come out here, sir!"
The boy obeyed.
"Now then, Willard," said Mr. Nichols, "I presume you understand the rules of this school?"
"I think I do, sir."