We have said that the school prospered. The entire community went to it, male and female, old and young. John Adams not only taught his pupils all he knew, but set himself laboriously to acquire all the knowledge that was to be obtained by severe study of the Bible, the Prayer-book. Carteret’s Voyages, and by original meditation. From the first mine he gathered and taught the grand, plain, and blessed truths about salvation through Jesus, together with a few tares of error resulting from misconception and imperfect reasoning. From the second he adopted the forms of worship of the Church of England. From the third he gleaned and amplified a modicum of nautical, geographical, and general information; and from the fourth he extracted a flood of miscellaneous, incomplete, and disjointed facts, fancies, and fallacies, which at all events served the good purpose of interesting his pupils and exercising their mental powers.
But into the midst of all this life death stepped and claimed a victim. The great destroyer came not, however, as an enemy but as a friend, to raise little James Young to that perfect rest of which he had already had a foretaste on the island.
It was the first death among the second generation, and naturally had a deeply solemnising effect on the young people. This occurred soon after the departure of the Topaz. The little grave was made under the shade of a palm-grove, where wild-flowers grew in abundance, and openings in the leafy canopy let in the glance of heaven’s blue eye.
One evening, about six months after this event, Adams went up the hill to an eminence to which he was fond of retiring when a knotty problem in arithmetic had to be tackled. Arithmetic was his chief difficulty. The soliloquy which he uttered on reaching his place of meditation will explain his perplexities.
“That ’rithmetic do bother me, an’ no mistake,” he said, with a grave shake of the head at a lively lizard which was looking up in his face. “You see, history is easy. What I knows I knows an’ can teach, an’ what I don’t know I let alone, an there’s an end on’t. There’s no makin’ a better o’ that. Then, as to writin’, though my hand is crabbed enough, and my pot-hooks are shaky and sprawly, still I know the shapes o’ things, an’ the youngsters are so quick that they can most of ’em write better than myself; but in regard to that ’rithmetic, it’s a heartbreak altogether, for I’ve only just got enough of it to puzzle me. Wi’ the use o’ my fingers I can do simple addition pretty well, an’ I can screw round subtraction, but multiplication’s a terrible business. Unfort’nitely my edication has carried me only the length o’ the fourth line, an’ that ain’t enough.”
He paused, and the lively lizard, ready to fly at a moment’s notice, put its head on one side as if interested in the man’s difficulty.
“Seven times eight, now,” continued Adams. “I’ve no more notion what that is than the man in the moon. An’ I’ve no table to tell me, an’ no way o’ findin’ it out—eh? Why, yes I have. I’ll mark ’em down one at a time an’ count ’em up.”
He gave his thigh a slap, which sent the lively lizard into his hole, horrified.
“Poor thing, I didn’t mean that,” he said to the absent animal. “Hows’ever, I’ll try it. Why, I’ll make a multiplication-table for myself. Strange that that way never struck me before.”
As he went on muttering he busied himself in rubbing clean a flat surface of rock, on which, with a piece of reddish stone, he made a row of eight marks, one below another. Alongside of that he made another row of eight marks, and so on till he had put down seven rows, when he counted them up, and found the result to be fifty-six. This piece of acquired knowledge he jotted down in a little notebook, which, with a quantity of other stationery, had originally belonged to that great fountain of wealth, the Bounty.