joy in my pilfering.  Mr. Carnegie has lent his sanction to this sort of thing by fostering libraries.  Shakespeare was arrested for stealing a deer, but extolled for stealing the plots of “Romeo and Juliet,” “Comedy of Errors,” and others of his plays.  It seems quite all right to steal ideas, or even thoughts, and this may account again for the old man’s lantern.  But, even so, it would seem quite iconoclastic to say that education is the process of reminding people of their debts and of training them to steal.

CHAPTER VII

COMPLETE LIVING

In my quiet way I have been making inquiries among my acquaintances for a long time, trying to find out what education really is.  As a schoolmaster I must try to make it appear that I know.  In fact, I am quite a Sir Oracle on the subject of education in my school.  But, in the quiet of my den, after the day’s work is done, I often long for some one to come in and tell me just what it is.  I am fairly conversant with the multiplication table and can distinguish between active and passive verbs, but even with these attainments I somehow feel that I have not gone to the extreme limits of the meaning of education.  In reality, I don’t know what it is or what it is for.  I do wish that the man who says in his book that education is a preparation for complete living would come into this room right now, sit down in that chair, and tell me, man to man, what complete living is.  I want to know and think I have a right to know.  Besides, he has no right to withhold this information from me.  He had no right to get me all stirred up with his definition, and then go away and leave me dangling in the air.  If he were here I’d ask him a few pointed questions.  I’d ask him to tell me just how the fact that seven times nine is sixty-three is connected up with complete living.  I’d want him to explain, too, what the binomial theorem has to do with complete living, and also the dative of reference.  I got the notion, when I was struggling with that binomial theorem, that it would ultimately lead on to fame or fortune; but it hasn’t done either, so far as I can make out.

There was a time when I could solve an equation of three unknown quantities, and could even jimmy a quantity out from under a radical sign, and had the feeling that I was quite a fellow.  Then one day I went into a bookstore to buy a book.  I had quite enough money to pay for one, and had somehow got the notion that a boy of my attainments ought to have a book.  But, in the presence of the blond chap behind the counter, I was quite abashed, for I did not in the least know what book I wanted.  I knew it wasn’t a Bible, for we had one at home, but further than that I could not go.  Now, if knowing how to buy a book is a part of complete living, then, in that blond presence, I was hopelessly adrift.  I had been taught that gambling is wrong, but there was a situation where I had to take a chance or show the white feather.  Of course, I took the chance and was relieved of my money by a blond who may or may not have been able to solve radicals.  I shall not give the title of the book I drew in that lottery, for this is neither the time nor the place for confessions.