the thing was a piece of abominable red tape: I do not mean in theory,
but in the results of its working in that particular case. I had seen
boys and men in school and college in England and Scotland obtain
"first-class honors" with a mark of 75, and I now marvelled how it
happened that boys who had but a faint idea of what hard work really
meant were able to produce such brilliant results, more especially when
so much of their time and attention was devoted to the preparation of
orations and dialogues, and even to the rehearsal of private theatricals
(the principal would have gone crazy had any one presumed to call them
by that name in his hearing) for the approaching "entertainment," two of
which treats were offered "_by the school_" (a great deal in those three
words) to the public during the year. I may mention that on these two
occasions it was the part of the principal to ascend the stage during
the _entr'acte_ and read off from a paper he held in his hand a few
particulars regarding those precious averages which seemed in the
speaker's and hearers' minds to be exactly commensurate with the
standing and progress of the pupils.

My marking made me for some time rather unpopular; and beginning at last
to follow the time-honored injunction, "When you are in Rome do as the
Romans do," I hoisted my boys from the sixties and seventies to the more
plausible eighties and nineties. It was, no doubt, an unprincipled thing
to do, but I soothed my outraged conscience with the thought that I was
making a martyr of myself--that when the examination-week arrived the
examiners' reports would confound me by exposing the difference between
my paper and their gold. The examination-week did arrive, of course, and
I found that I was to be myself the examiner of my classes. Let not the
reader think that I would be pleasantly satiric when I say that not till
then did I fully awake to the fruitful meaning of the expression,
"American independence." And neither let him infer that I take such a
school to be a representative American high-class school: I only say
that it is a fair representative of a class of schools that is both
numerous and popular in the cities I have named above. Here, indeed, was
an application of the _sui-juris_ principle that, though it certainly
eased my feeling of apprehension and doubt as to the probable results of
the examination, yet filled me with a vague sense of dissatisfaction.
And the reason is not far to