When the painful affair was over, I gave him my hand cordially and frankly, and said, "Charlie, you have honorably and courageously atoned for a grievous fault, and I assure you, I restore you not only to your position in school, but to my respect and confidence."
I never had any further difficulty with Charlie Graham. Years afterwards, when I met his father at the Springs, he could hardly contain his amazement when I told him that I had once flogged his oldest son Charlie, at his own particular request. It was, I suppose, the first and last time the hand of correction was ever laid on him.
XXIII.
PHRENOLOGY.
In the previous chapter I gave a leaf from my experience of life in a boarding-school. I propose now to give another leaf from the same book. The incident about to be narrated, however, is not given as an illustration of boarding-school life, but merely because it happened at school. It might have happened elsewhere, though the circumstances on that occasion were particularly favorable for giving to it a curious point.
While I was at the head of the Edgehill school, at Princeton, N. J., a stranger called one day and announced himself as Prof. ——. The name is one almost as well known in the history of Phrenological science as that of Prof. Combe. He said he was about to give a lecture in Princeton on the subject of Phrenology, and as he was an entire stranger to myself and to all the pupils and teachers in the school, he thought it would be a good opportunity for making an interesting and critical experiment. He proposed, therefore, with my consent, to spend an hour, in presence of the school, in examining the heads of any of the boys that I might call up for that purpose. From the very intimate relations existing in a boarding-school, the characters of the boys would be well known to me and to their companions and teachers, and we would have therefore the means of knowing how far he succeeded in his experiment.
Thinking that an hour spent in this way would not be misspent, that it would at least give some variety to the monotonous routine of study and lessons, and, let me add, being not entirely without curiosity as to the result, I consented to his proposition, and called the school together in the large assembly-room. All the boys being in their seats, together with the teachers and the ladies of the household, I stated briefly the object of their assembling and the method in which it was proposed to proceed with the experiment. They were to observe entire silence, and to give no indication, by word or look, so far as they could help it, to show whether the Professor was hitting the mark or not, as he read off to them the characters of their companions. The boys took to the idea at once, and the excitement very soon was at fever-heat.
Placing a chair upon the platform, in full view of the school, and the Professor alongside of it, I called up
Boy No. 1.—This happened to be a lad about fourteen, from the interior of Alabama. He was the most athletic boy in school. "Full big he was of brawn and eke of bones," as Chaucer says, in his picture of the Miller. He could beat any boy in school in wrestling, and no doubt could flog any of them in a fist-fight, though on this point I speak only from conjecture, as this part of boys' amusements is not always as well known to their teachers as it is to the boys themselves. The Professor, after some little manipulation of the cranium, read off the boy's character with tolerable accuracy. Any one, however, with a grain of observation, who had seen the boy stalking up to the platform, with bold, almost defiant air, or had noticed his bull-neck, hard fist, and swaggering gait, could not have had much difficulty in guessing what kind of a boy he was, without resort to his bumps for information. It was written in unmistakable characters all over his physical conformation, from his head to his heels.