ella was right in thinking that the principal liked her. he was severe, often harsh. sometimes he seemed to delight in making the children uncomfortable, and even in punishing them. when he read the bible in the opening exercises, he had a way of emphasizing verses about liars and thieves that made his most truthful and honest pupils cringe and think that they must have said something that was false or done something dishonest. with a voice of scorn and utter contempt he would read, “i cannot dig; to beg i am ashamed,” and then apply the verses to those pupils who were too lazy to dig, but were not ashamed to beg their classmates for help.
ella was perhaps the one child in school who was not afraid of him. the only time that he had ever shown to her his liking to frighten and tantalize children was on the day when he had sent for her to come to his office; and that little interview had ended so happily that she always thought of it as a jest. then, too, he had once known the dead father whose memory she worshiped, and that was enough to win her heart.
to this principal it was something new in all his years of teaching to find himself caring what any pupil thought of him; but it was a fact that when he[pg 143] had made some harsh speech and then caught ella’s look of surprise and regret, he felt uncomfortable. he would have been amazed if any one had said, “you are much more gentle and kindly because you want that child to think well of you,” but it was true nevertheless.
the arithmetic was his share of the teaching, and he conducted it by methods that were successful certainly, but never used in any other school in the city. he was quite likely to break into a rather lame explanation of a problem by handing the one who was reciting a foot-rule and saying, “go and measure those steps across the street and find out how many square feet of boards are in them”; or, “there’s a pile of wood in the next yard. go and find out how many cords there are.” once when he thought a class needed waking up, he suddenly asked, “what would happen if an irresistible force should meet an immovable body?” again he demanded, “why can’t a man lift himself up by his bootstraps?” another time he sent a boy for a wooden rolling hoop. when it arrived, he held it firmly to the chalk ledge of the blackboard, and marked one point on the hoop where it touched the ledge and another exactly opposite that one. then he turned the hoop a little and demanded, “why does the point at the top move over more distance than the opposite point at the bottom? you can see that the whole hoop is moving, can’t you? why don’t they keep together?”
[pg 144]
there would be reasons why it did and why it didn’t, until when he thought the class were thoroughly waked up, he would turn back to the lesson and go on as if there had been no interruption. he was as fond of cube root as if it had been a pet child of his own, and when ella’s class came to that corner of the arithmetic, he took it almost as a personal grievance that they complained of the difficulty.
“you try to do it without thinking,” he declared wrathfully. “if you have just three minutes in which to do something new, take two of them to think out what is the best and quickest way to do it. cube root is the finest thing in the arithmetic. miss ella doesn’t groan over it,” he added, “and you ought to be able to do it as well as she.”
“ella’s done it before,” said a boy. “she did it before she ever came to this school. she said so.”
the principal’s fine little speech was spoiled. probably he had never come so near being angry with her. when the class was over, he called her to the desk. “miss ella—ella,” he said, “you must always remember that there are some things which it is better not to tell.”
he had quite a liking for making his pupils turn teachers. sometimes he would say to a boy or girl in the middle of a recitation, “you may take the class now”; and he would sit back restfully in his big chair on the platform with his eyes half closed.
it was an honor to be asked to hear a class, but it[pg 145] was hardly a pleasure, for the gentleman in the chair was not so sleepy as he seemed, and woe to the substitute teacher if he allowed the slightest mistake to pass.
sometimes when the teacher of a lower room was absent, he would send one of the first roomers in to take her place.
“tell them,” he would say, “to multiply 1 by 2; that product by 3; that by 4; and so on until they have multiplied by 26. then let every one who has it right go home.”
“will you please give me the right answer?” the young substitute teacher would ask, and he would reply with apparent indifference,
“oh, i haven’t it. you can do it while the others are at work”—not an especially easy thing for a child of twelve to do, particularly as he knew well that the principal would look in every little while to make sure that everything was going on in orderly fashion.
hearing one another’s lessons was common, and correcting one another’s papers; but ella had an experience in teaching that went far beyond this. one day the principal called her and said,
“miss ella—ella—there’s a boy in the office who says he never understood why you invert the divisor. i want you to go in and explain it to him.”
in a minute ella came back and said,
“there is a man in there, but there isn’t any boy.”
“well, boy—man—it is all the same. just go[pg 146] back and explain it to him as if he was a small boy.”
ella’s seminary experiences came in play. she had been so used to being counted with grown-ups when she was a member of the “literary and scientific course” that she did not feel the least bit embarrassed or awkward, but explained and cut up an apple to illustrate as easily and naturally as if the strange man had been the boy whom she was expecting to find.
“did he understand?” asked the principal when she returned to the schoolroom.
“he said he did,” ella replied.
“i should think he did,” the principal said to ella’s mother afterwards. “he has been teaching—you can guess how well—somewhere in the backwoods, and he is trying to learn a little something before he goes back. he said he never understood before why you invert the divisor, but i think he will always remember now.”
most of the work in the first room was merely a continuation of that in the second, but there were two new books to be bought and two entirely new subjects to be taken up. one of these new subjects was the writing of compositions. this was the dread of the whole class.
“i don’t see why you should dread that,” said the mother. “you liked to write your ‘little pearls’ when you were only eight years old; and you and boy cousin had a fine time writing the ‘bearcamp books.’[pg 147] i have seen you spend half an evening over ‘parker’s aids to composition.’ you liked that.”
“yes,” replied ella thoughtfully, “but i picked out from parker’s just what i liked to do. there were sentences with a word left out, and there were sentences where one word was used till i was tired of it. it was just like a puzzle in a paper to make those right; it was play. and when boy cousin and i wrote the ‘bearcamp books,’ we only wrote the things that came into our own heads. the girls in the first class say that in school compositions we have to write the things that come into other people’s heads.”
“and you don’t know how to get them out?” said the mother with a smile. “wait till your first subject is given you, and perhaps it won’t be so bad as you think.”
“the first class had to write last year on ‘the seasons,’ ‘taste and fashion,’ ‘books of value,’ ‘art and artists,’ ‘what costs nothing is worth nothing’; and i am sure as sure that i haven’t a word to say about those,” said ella dolefully.
when the first subject was given, it proved to be “printing.” ella tried her best to produce what she thought was in grown-people’s minds about it. she read the articles on printing in two encyclopædias, and then she set to work. after many struggles she wrote:
the honour of inventing printing is usually given to gutenberg. scarcely anything is known of his life until[pg 148] the age of thirty-six, when he entered into a contract with a certain company, promising to impart to them whatever knowledge he possessed concerning the secret of printing. the company probably intended to commence the practice of this art, but their plans were frustrated by the death of one of the leading members of the association.
so ella wrote, primly and stiffly, as she imagined grown-ups always did when they wrote for one another. she even spelled the familiar “honor” with a u, because it had a u in the encyclopædia, and she supposed it ought to have one in a composition.
she struggled with that composition with an energy worthy of a better result; and when it was returned, the world seemed hollow as she read, “spelling, 5 off,” and saw that the guilty cause of her loss was that word “honour.” farther down the page, however, there was a comforting little note, “10 extras for the expressions being your own.” her own, indeed!
one of the two new books bought for use in the first room was a sixth reader. remembering that the date of its publication was 1866, one can almost name the articles of prose and poetry of which it consisted. compiled at the close of the civil war and only fourscore years after the american revolution, there was of course much about union and freedom and independence. there was the eloquence of webster and the “gettysburg speech” of lincoln; there was “sheridan’s ride” and “the ride of paul revere,” and “the antiquity of freedom.”
the united states was young and strong, and in[pg 149] natural reaction reading books for children, as well as volumes of selections for older folk, contained many articles about death. in the sixth reader was the gruesome tale of ginevra, who in sport hid in a great chest on her wedding day and was suffocated therein, her body not being found till many years afterwards; there was the “death of little nell,” “over the river,” “the conqueror’s grave,” the “burial of sir john moore,” the story of the indian who was swept over niagara falls, and an especially vivid account of the horrors of the french revolution. against all the theories of pedagogy, such thoughts as these were chosen to put into youthful minds—and did them not one bit of harm. the country was all a-thrill with energy, and here in the children’s reader was much of meditative prose and poetry, “the old clock on the stair,” the “address to a mummy,” byron’s “apostrophe to the ocean,” collins’s “ode to the passions,” and gray’s “elegy in a country churchyard”—and the strange part of it all was that the children actually enjoyed these serious writings.
no one, least of all the children themselves, ever demanded entertaining stories in the reading class or a frequent change of readers any more than they demanded interesting examples in arithmetic or a change in the spelling of words or in the multiplication table. the same selections were read over and over, but no one seemed bored by the repetition. the[pg 150] secret was that when the reader was taken in hand, no one expected to be amused. every one realized that there was some definite work to do. what the author meant must be discovered. then one after another was called on to read the same paragraph or stanza until the teacher was satisfied that the thought had been fully brought out. the selections in the reader were carefully chosen to give scope to thought and expression. to read well was regarded as an accomplishment. the best reader in the room was looked upon with envy and admiration. visitors often asked if they might hear a class in reading.
as has been said, when the reader was taken in hand, every one in the class realized that there was work to be done; but of course not all succeeded equally well in doing it. one pupil declared his belief that a “storied urn” meant an urn “that you could tell a lot of stories about.” another demanded with emphasis,
“and how can man die better
than facing fearful odes?”
and yet another, coming to
“yet my last thought is england’s—fly!
to dacre bear my signet ring,”
read in defiance of both sense and punctuation,
“yet my last thought is england’s fly.”
it was a long time before he ceased to bear the nickname of “england’s fly.”
