ind man, and long afterwards he had a friendly
smile and word for the boy when they met; and then all at once he ceased
to be, as men and things do in a boy's world.

The other school was another private school; and it was doubtless a
school of high grade in some things, for it was called the Academy. But
there was provision for the youngest beginners in a lower room, and for
a while my boy went there. Before school opened in the afternoon, the
children tried to roast apples on the stove, but there never was time,
and they had to eat them half raw. In the singing-class there was a boy
who wore his hair so enviably long that he could toss it on his neck as
he wheeled in the march of the class round the room; his father kept a
store and he brought candy to school. They sang "Scotland's burning!
Pour on water" and "Home, home! Dearest and happiest home!" No doubt
they did other things, but none of them remained in my boy's mind; and
when he was promoted to the upper room very little more was added. He
studied Philosophy, as it was called, and he learned, as much from the
picture as the text, that you could not make a boat go by filling her
sail from bellows on board; he did not see why. But he was chiefly
concerned with his fears about the Chemical Room, where I suppose some
chemical apparatus must have been kept, but where the big boys were
taken to be whipped. It was a place of dreadful execution to him, and
when he was once sent to the Chemical Boom, and shut up there, because
he was crying, and because, as he explained, he could not stop crying
without a handkerchief, and he had none with him, he never expected to
come out alive.

In fact, as I have said, he dwelt in a world of terrors; and I doubt if
some of the big boys who were taken there to be whipped underwent so
much as he in being merely taken to the place where they had been
whipped. At the same time, while he cowered along in the shadow of
unreal dangers, he had a boy's boldness with most of the real ones, and
he knew how to resent an indignity even at the hands of the teacher who
could send him to the Chemical Room at pleasure. He knew what belonged
to him as a small boy of honor, and one thing was, not to be tamely put
back from a higher to a lower place in his studies. I dare say that boys
do not mind this now; they must have grown ever so much wiser since my
boy went to school; but in his time, when you were put back, say from
the Third Reader to the Sec