“Cooking!  Ain’t you a school-teacher?  What do you mean by proposing to stop cooking in order to teach school?  Why, it’s preposterous.”

“Begorra, I came here to get the cook’s place, sor, and that’s all of it.”

“Oh, by George!  I see now.  You ain’t a candidate for the grammar school, after all.  You want to see Mrs. Twiddler.  Maria, come down here a minute.  There’s a thick-headed immigrant here wants to cook for you.”

And the judge picked up his paper and resumed the editorial on “The Impending Crisis.”

They obtained a good teacher, however, and the course of affairs in the girls’ department was smooth enough; but just after the opening of the fall session there was some trouble in the boys’ department.

Mr. Barnes, the master, read in the Educational Monthly that boys could be taught history better than in any other way by letting each boy in the class represent some historical character, and relate the acts of that character as if he had done them himself.  This struck Barnes as a mighty good idea, and he resolved to put it in practice.  The school had then progressed so far in its study of the history of Rome as the Punic wars, and Mr. Barnes immediately divided the boys into two parties, one Romans and the other Carthaginians, and certain of the boys were named after the leaders upon both sides.  All the boys thought it was a fine thing, and Barnes noticed that they were so anxious to get to the history lesson that they could hardly say their other lessons properly.

When the time came, Barnes ranged the Romans upon one side of the room and the Carthaginians on the other.  The recitation was very spirited, each party telling about its deeds with extraordinary unction.  After a while Barnes asked a Roman to describe the battle of Cannae.  Whereupon the Romans hurled their copies of Wayland’s Moral Science at the enemy.  Then the Carthaginians made a battering-ram out of a bench and jammed it among the Romans, who retaliated with a volley of books, slates and chewed paper-balls.  Barnes concluded that the battle of Cannae had been sufficiently illustrated, and he tried to stop it; but the warriors considered it too good a thing to let drop, and accordingly the Carthaginians dashed over to the Romans with another battering-ram and thumped a couple of them savagely.

Then the Romans turned in, and the fight became general.  A Carthaginian would grasp a Roman by the hair and hustle him around over the desk in a manner that was simply frightful, and a Roman would give a fiendish whoop and knock a Carthaginian over the head with Greenleaf’s Arithmetic.  Hannibal got the head of Scipio Africanus under his arm, and Scipio, in his efforts to break away, stumbled, and the two generals fell and had a rough-and-tumble fight under the blackboard.  Caius Gracchus prodded Hamilcar with a ruler, and the latter in his struggles to get loose fell against the stove and knocked down about thirty feet of stove-pipe.  Thereupon the Romans made a grand rally, and in five minutes they chased the entire Carthaginian army out of the school-room, and Barnes along with it; and then they locked the door and began to hunt up the apples and lunch in the desks of the enemy.