e the cause of selfish
candidates for public office, who promise them rewards. The true
teachers are of another strain. Apostles all of an ideal, they go to
their work in a spirit of love and inquiry, seeking not comfort, not
position, not old-age pensions, but truth that is the soul of wisdom,
the joy of big-eyed children, the food of hungry youth.

They were true teachers who used to come to me on Arlington Street, so
my father had reason to boast of the distinction brought upon his
house. For the school-teacher in her trim, unostentatious dress was an
uncommon visitor in our neighborhood; and the talk that passed in the
bare little "parlor" over the grocery store would not have been
entirely comprehensible to our next-door neighbor.

In the grammar school I had as good teaching as I had had in the
primary. It seems to me in retrospect that it was as good, on the
whole, as the public school ideals of the time made possible. When I
recall how I was taught geography, I see, indeed, that there was room
for improvement occasionally both in the substance and in the method
of instruction. But I know of at least one teacher of Chelsea who
realized this; for I met her, eight years later, at a great
metropolitan university that holds a summer session for the benefit of
school-teachers who want to keep up with the advance in their science.
Very likely they no longer teach geography entirely within doors, and
by rote, as I was taught. Fifteen years is plenty of time for
progress.

When I joined the first grammar grade, the class had had a half-year's
start of me, but it was not long before I found my place near the
head. In all branches except geography it was genuine progress. I
overtook the youngsters in their study of numbers, spelling, reading,
and composition. In geography I merely made a bluff, but I did not
know it. Neither did my teacher. I came up to such tests as she put
me.

The lesson was on Chelsea, which was right: geography, like charity,
should begin at home. Our text ran on for a paragraph or so on the
location, boundaries, natural features, and industries of the town,
with a bit of local history thrown in. We were to learn all these
interesting facts, and be prepared to write them out from memory the
next day. I went home and learned--learned every word of the text,
every comma, every footnote. When the teacher had read my paper she
marked it "EE." "E" was for "excellent," but my paper was absolutely
perf