One time I spent the greater part of a forenoon watching logs go over a dam.  It seems a simple thing to tell, and hardly worth the telling, but it was a great morning in actual experience.  In time those huge logs became things of life, and when they arose from their mighty plunge into the watery deeps they seemed to shake themselves free and laugh in their freedom.  And there were battles, too.  They struggled and fought and rode over one another, and their mighty collisions produced a very thunder of sound.  I tried to read the book which I had with me, but could not.  In the presence of such a scene one cannot read a book unless it is one of Victor Hugo’s.  That copy-book looms up again as I think of those logs, and I wonder whether knowledge is power, and whether experience is the best teacher.  But, dear me!  Here I’ve been frittering away all this good time, and these papers not graded yet!

CHAPTER XXII

STORY-TELLING

My boys like to have me tell them stories, and, if the stories are true ones, they like them all the better.  So I sometimes become reminiscent when they gather about me and let them lead me along as if I couldn’t help myself when they are so interested.  In this way I become one of them.  I like to whittle a nice pine stick while I talk, for then the talk seems incidental to the whittling and so takes hold of them all the more.  In the midst of the talking a boy will sometimes slip into my hand a fresh stick, when I have about exhausted the whittling resources of the other.  That’s about the finest encore I have ever received.  A boy knows how to pay a compliment in a delicate way when the mood for compliments is on him, and if that mood of his is handled with equal delicacy great things may be accomplished.

Well, the other day as I whittled the inevitable pine stick I let them lure from me the story of Sant.  Now, Sant was my seatmate in the village school back yonder, and I now know that I loved him whole-heartedly.  I didn’t know this at the time, for I took him as a matter of course, just as I did my right hand.  His name was Sanford, but boys don’t call one another by their right names.  They soon find affectionate nicknames.  I have quite a collection of these nicknames myself, but have only a hazy notion of how or where they were acquired.  When some one calls me by one of these names, I can readily locate him in time and place, for I well know that he must belong in a certain group or that name would not come to his lips.  These nicknames that we all have are really historical.  Well, we called him Sant, and that name conjures up before me one of the most wholesome boys I have ever known.  He was brimful of fun.  A heartier, more sincere laugh a boy never had, and my affection for him was as natural as my breathing.  He knew I liked him, though I never told him so.  Had I told him, the charm would have been broken.