"Good-bye, Goosey!
Hoidy Pearl."
That was all. Luke is more morose and petulant than he used to be. He is decaying about apace with Rackenshack, and he smokes constantly. He is vastly wealthy and unmarried.
Betsy is quiet and kind. Up stairs in her chest is hidden the mahogany coffer full of golden testimonials of her brother's days of happiness and the one dark hour of his despair!
The Pedagogue.
He was one of the farmer princes of Hoosierdom, a man of more than average education, a fluent talker and ready with a story. Knowing that I was looking up reminiscences of Hoosier life and specimens of Hoosier character, he volunteered one evening to give me the following, vouching for the truth of it. Here it is, as I "short-handed" it from his own lips. I omit quotation marks.
The study of one's past life is not unlike the study of geology. If the presence of the remains of extinct species of animals and vegetables in the ancient rocks calls up in one's mind a host of speculative thoughts touching the progress of creation, so, as we cut with the pick of retrospection through the strata of bygone days, do the remains of departed things, constantly turning up, put one into his studying cap to puzzle over specimens fully as curious and interesting in their way as the cephalaspis.
The first stratum of my intellectual formation contains most conspicuously the remains of dog-eared spelling books, a score or more of them by different names, among which the Elementary of Webster is the best preserved and most clearly defined. It was finding an old, yellow, badly thumbed and dirt soiled copy of Webster's spelling book in the bottom of an old chest of odds and ends, on the fly-leaf of which book was written "T. Blodgett," that lately brightened my memory of the things I am about to tell you.
The old time pedagogue is a thing of the past—pars temporis acti is the Latin of it, may be, but I'm not sure—I'm rusty in the Latin now. When I quit school I could read it a good deal. But of the pedagogue. The twenty years since he ceased to flourish seem, on reflection, like an age—an æon, as the Greeks would say. I never did know much Greek. I got most of my education from pedagogues of the old sort. They kept pouring it on to me till it soaked in. That's the way I got it. I have had corns and bunions on my back for not being sufficiently porous to absorb the multiplication table rapidly enough to suit the whim of one of those learned tyrants. But the pedagogue became extinct and passed into the fossil state some twenty years ago, when free schools took good hold. He scampered away when he heard the whistle of the steam engine along iron highways and the cry of small boys on the streets of the towns hawking the daily papers. He could live nowhere within the pale of innovation. He was born an exemplar of rigidity. The very name of reform was hateful to him. We older fellows remember him well, but to the younger fry he is not even a fossil, he is a myth. Of course pedagogues differed slightly in the matter of particular disposition and real character, but in a general way they had a close family resemblance.