"What is ice?"
"Water fast asleep."
"What is a skeleton?"
"A man without any meat on it."
A teacher was examining a class on the battle of Bannockburn, and asked, "Who killed de Bohun?" No one knew. He raised his arm in an attitude of striking, and yelled, with flashing eyes, "Who killed de Bohun, I say?" A little fellow near him, who expected the blow, raised his arm in a defensive attitude, and whined, "Oh, please, sir, it wasna me."
"What is meant by faith?" was one day asked of a class. "Faith," responded a thoughtful youth, "is the faculty which enables us to believe things that we know to be not true."
In the lesson of a class of country boys not long ago, the words "above the average" occurred, and the lady teacher asked if any one could tell what the word "average" meant. There was no response for a time, and she passed the question from one to another until a more than average specimen eagerly responded, "It's a thing that hens lay on." The teacher was dumb-founded, and asked for an explanation. "Well," drawled the budding Solomon, "my mother says that our hens lay each four eggs a week—on an average."
It is a teacher's business to observe that his scholars are clean as well as clever, and the Rev. David Macrae, in his entertaining little book of Quaint Sayings of Children, tells how a teacher, after glancing round the class one day, said to a boy, "I'll let you off if you can find a hand in all the school as dirty as that one," indicating the boy's own grimy exposed paw. The youth promptly brought forth and showed his other fist, which was certainly dirtier still, and the master, in view of his pledge, had no resource but to let the offender go for that time any way.
An old story, which has had a lively currency, tells of how a boy when he returned from school was always asked where he stood in his class, and whose invariable answer was, "I'm second dux." For the regular holding of this excellent position he received many fine things in the shape of sweets and biscuits, and pennies, etc., until at length it occurred to one of the family to ask him how many were in his class. It was then the gilt fell off the ginger-bread. "Oh," said he, "there's just me and anither lassie."
Dean Ramsay tells of a very practical answer given by a little girl who had been asked the meaning of "darkness," as it occurred in Scripture reading—"Just steek your een." In the same place, he says, on the question, "What is the pestilence that walketh in darkness?" being put to a class, a little boy answered, after consideration, "Oh, it's just bugs."