Young Bully wears them. He comes to school with his stick, and whenever you want a match to light the gas with he can always supply you, and feels happy he is able for once to oblige you.
In some boys I have often deplored the presence of two ears. What you impart through one immediately escapes through the other. Explain to them a rule once a week, they will always enjoy hearing it again. It will always be new to them. Their lives will ever be a series of enchantments and surprises.
You must persevere, and repeat things to them a hundred times, if ninety-nine will not do. Who knows there is not a John Wesley among them?
"I remember," once said this celebrated divine, "hearing my father say to my mother: 'How could you have the patience to tell that blockhead the same thing twenty times over?' 'Why,' said she, 'if I had told him only nineteen times, I should have lost all my labor.'"
I am not sure that the boy with only one ear is not still more tiresome. He always turns his deaf ear to you, and makes his little infirmity pay. "He is afraid he did not quite hear you, when you set the work yesterday." For my part, I met the difficulty by having desks placed each side of my chair. On my left I had the boys who had good right ears; on my right, those who had good left ones.
I can not say I ever saw many signs of gratitude in boys for this solicitude of mine in their behalf.
At dictation time the two-eared boy is terrible, and you need all the self-control you have acquired on the English shores to keep your head cool.