complexions beaming with
youth and high health beneath them! I think of Motherwell's going to school
with his "dear Jenny Morrison," so touchingly described in his beautiful
poem of that name, every time these scenes arise before me.

Well, at this "man-school" I first learned the lesson which I am about to
illustrate. It is a lesson for parents, a lesson for instructors, and, I
think, a lesson for children also. I remember names _here_, for one was
almost burned into my brain for years afterwards.

There was something very imposing about "opening the school" on the first
day of the winter session. The trustees of the same were present; a
hard-headed old farmer, who sent long piles of "cord wood," beach, maple,
bass-wood, and birch, out of his "own _pocket_," he used to say--and he
might, with equal propriety, have said, "out of his own _head_," for surely
_there_ was no lack of "timber;" Deacon C----, an educated Puritan, who
could spell, read, write, "punctify," and--"knew grammar," as he himself
expressed it; a thin-faced doctor, whose horse was snorting at the door,
and who sat, on that occasion, with his saddle-bags crossed on his knee,
being in something of a hurry, expecting, I believe, an "addition" in the
neighborhood, to the subject of my present gossip--at all events, I well
remember peeping under the wrinkled leather-flaps of the "bags" and seeing
a wooden cartridge-box, with holes for the death-dealing vials; and last,
but not least, the town blacksmith, who was, in fact, worth all the other
trustees put together, being a man of sound common sense, with something
more than a sprinkling of useful education. Under the auspices of these
trustees, this "man-school" was thus opened for the winter. "Now look you
what befell."

For the first four or five days, our schoolmaster was quite amiable--or so
at least he seemed. His "rules," and they were arbitrary enough, were given
out on the second day; five scholars were "admonished" on the third; on the
fourth, about a dozen were "warned," as the pedagogue termed it; and on the
fifth, there was set up in the corner of an open closet, in plain sight of
all the school, a bundle containing about a dozen birch switches, each some
six feet long, and rendered lithe and tough by being tempered in the hot
embers of the fire. These were to be the "ministers of justice;" and the
portents of this "dreadful note of preparation" were amply fulfilled.

I had just begun to learn