es,
at least an improved boy. The trouble with vain people like Pewee is,
that they have no stability. They bend the way the wind blows, and for
the most part the wind blows from the wrong quarter.

CHAPTER IX

PIGEON POT-PIE

Happy boys and girls that go to school nowadays! You have to study
harder than the generations before you, it is true; you miss the jolly
spelling-schools, and the good old games that were not half so
scientific as base-ball, lawn tennis, or lacrosse, but that had ten
times more fun and frolic in them; but all this is made up to you by the
fact that you escape the tyrannical old master. Whatever the faults the
teachers of this day may have, they do not generally lacerate the backs
of their pupils, as did some of their fore-runners.

At the time of which I write, thirty years ago, a better race of
school-masters was crowding out the old, but many of the latter class,
with their terrible switches and cruel beatings, kept their ground until
they died off one by one, and relieved the world of their odious ways.

Mr. Ball wouldn't die to please anybody. He was a bachelor, and had no
liking for children, but taught school five or six months in winter to
avoid having to work on a farm in the summer. He had taught in Greenbank
every winter for a quarter of a century, and having never learned to win
anybody's affection, had been obliged to teach those who disliked him.
This atmosphere of mutual dislike will sour the sweetest temper, and Mr.
Ball's temper had not been strained honey to begin with. Year by year he
grew more and more severe--he whipped for poor lessons, he whipped for
speaking in school, he took down his switch for not speaking loud enough
in class, he whipped for coming late to school, he whipped because a
scholar made a noise with his feet, and he whipped because he himself
had eaten something unwholesome for his breakfast. The brutality of a
master produces like qualities in scholars. The boys drew caricatures on
the blackboard, put living cats or dead ones into Mr. Ball's desk, and
tried to drive him wild by their many devices.

He would walk up and down the school-room seeking a victim, and he had as
much pleasure in beating a girl or a little boy as in punishing an
overgrown fellow.

And yet I cannot say that Mr. Ball was impartial. There were some pupils
that escaped. Susan Lanham was not punished, because her father, Dr.
Lanham, was a very influential man in the town;