There is a picture show just around the corner, and I’m in a quandary, right now, whether to follow the crowd to that show or sit here and read Ruskin’s “Sesame and Lilies.”  If I go to see the picture film I’ll probably see an exhibition of cowboy equestrian dexterity, with a “happy ever after” finale, and may also acquire the reputation among the neighbors of being up to date.  But, if I spend the evening with Ruskin, I shall have something worth thinking over as I go about my work to-morrow.  So here is another dilemma, and there is no one to decide the matter for me.  This being a free moral agent is not the fun that some folks try to make it appear.  I don’t really see how I shall ever get on unless I subscribe to Sam Walter Foss’s lines: 

  “No other song has vital breath
  Through endless time to fight with death,
  Than that the singer sings apart
  To please his solitary heart.”

CHAPTER XXVI

RABBIT PEDAGOGY

As I think back over my past life as a schoolmaster I keep wondering how many inebriates I have produced in my career.  I’d be glad to think that I have not a single one to my discredit, but that seems beyond the wildest hope, considering the character of my teaching.  I am a firm believer in temperance in all things; but, in the matter of pedagogy, my practice cannot be made to square with my theory.  In fact, I find, upon reflection, that I have been teaching intemperance all the while.  I’m glad the officers of my church do not know of my pedagogical practice.  If they did, they would certainly take action against me, and in that case I cannot see what adequate defense I could offer.  Being a schoolmaster, I could scarcely bring myself to plead ignorance, for such a plea as that might abrogate my license.  So I shall just keep quiet and look as nearly wise as possible.  It is embarrassing to me to reflect how long it has taken me to see the error of my practice.  If I had asked one of my boys he could have told me of the better way.

When we got the new desks in our school, back home, our teacher seemed very anxious to have them kept in their virgin state, and became quite animated as he walked up and down the aisle fulminating against the possible offender.  In the course of his sulphury remarks he threatened condign punishment upon the base miscreant who should dare use his penknife on one of those desks.  His address was equal to a course in “Paradise Lost,” nor was it without its effect upon the audience.  Every boy in the room felt in his pocket to make sure that it contained his knife, and every one began to wonder just where he would find the whetstone when he went home.  We were all eager for school to close for the day that we might set about the important matter of whetting our knives.  Henceforth wood-carving was a part of the regular order in our school, but it was done without special supervision.  Of