rod now? Were boys created merely to study Latin and
Arithmetic? No; the better purposes of their being are to sport, to leap,
to run, to shout, to slide upon the ice, to snow-ball!

Happy boys! Enjoy your play-time now, and come again to study, and to feel
the birch-rod and the ferule, to-morrow; not till to-morrow, for to-day is
Thursday-lecture; and ever since the settlement of Massachusetts, there
has been no school on Thursday afternoons. Therefore, sport, boys, while
you may; for the morrow cometh, with the birch-rod and the ferule; and
after that, another Morrow, with troubles of its own.

Now the master has set every thing to rights, and is ready to go home to
dinner. Yet he goes reluctantly. The old man has spent so much of his life
in the smoky, noisy, buzzing school-room, that, when he has a holiday, he
feels as if his place were lost, and himself a stranger in the world. But,
forth he goes; and there stands our old chair, vacant and solitary, till
good Master Cheever resumes his seat in it to-morrow morning.

"Grandfather," said Charley, "I wonder whether the boys did not use to
upset the old chair, when the school-master was out?"

"There is a tradition," replied Grandfather, "that one of its arms was
dislocated, in some such manner. But I cannot believe that any school-boy
would behave so naughtily."

As it was now later than little Alice's usual bedtime, Grandfather broke
off his narrative, promising to talk more about Master Cheever and his
scholars, some other evening.

Chapter IV

Accordingly the next evening, Grandfather resumed the history of his
beloved chair.

"Master Ezekiel Cheever," said he, "died in 1707, after having taught
school about seventy years. It would require a pretty good scholar in
arithmetic to tell how many stripes he had inflicted, and how many
birch-rods he had worn out, during all that time, in his fatherly
tenderness for his pupils. Almost all the great men of that period, and
for many years back, had been whipt into eminence by Master Cheever.
Moreover, he had written a Latin Accidence, which was used in schools more
than half a century after his death; so that the good old man, even in his
grave, was still the cause of trouble and stripes to idle school-boys."

Grandfather proceeded to say, that, when Master Cheever died, he
bequeathed the chair to the most learned man that was educated at his
school, or that had ever been born in America. This was the r