It will not seem out of place if I recall to them how the Revolution gave us Washington, the Adamses, Hancock, Madison, Franklin, Jefferson, and Hamilton; how slavery gave us Clay, Calhoun, and Webster; and how the Civil War gave us Lincoln, Seward, Stanton, Grant, Lee, Sherman, Sheridan, and “Stonewall” Jackson.  If there should, by chance, be any teachers present I’ll probably enlarge upon this historical phase of the subject if I can think of any other illustrations.  I shall certainly emphasize the fact that the incidental phases of school work may prove to be more important than the objects directly aimed at, that while the teacher is striving to inculcate a knowledge of arithmetic she may be inculcating manhood and womanhood, and that the by-products of her teaching may become world-wide influences.

As a peroration, I shall expand upon the subject of pleasure as an incidental of work—­showing how the mere pleasure-seeker never finds what he is seeking, but that the man who works is the one who finds pleasure.  I think I shall be able to find some apt quotation from Emerson before the time for the speech comes around.  If so, I shall use it so as to take their minds off the fact that I am taking the speech from Doctor Durell’s book.

CHAPTER IX

SCHOOL-TEACHING

The first school that I ever tried to teach was, indeed, fearfully and wonderfully taught.  The teaching was of the sort that might well be called elemental.  If there was any pedagogy connected with the work, it was purely accidental.  I was not conscious either of its presence or its absence, and so deserve neither praise nor censure.  I had one pupil who was nine years my senior, and I did not even know that he was retarded.  I recall quite distinctly that he had a luxuriant crop of chin-whiskers but even these did not disturb the procedure of that school.  We accepted him as he was, whiskers included, and went on our complacent way.  He was blind in one eye and somewhat deaf, but no one ever thought of him as abnormal or subnormal.  Even if we had known these words we should have been too polite to apply them to him.  In fact, we had no black-list, of any sort, in that school.  I have never been able to determine whether the absence of such a list was due to ignorance, or innocence, or both.  So long as he found the school an agreeable place in which to spend the winter, and did not interfere with the work of others, I could see no good reason why he should not be there and get what he could from the lessons in spelling, geography, and arithmetic.  I do not mention grammar for that was quite beyond him.  The agreement of subject and verb was one of life’s great mysteries to him.  So I permitted him to browse around in such pastures as seemed finite to him, and let the infinite grammar go by default so far as he was concerned.