course, each boy could prove an alibi when his own desk was under investigation.  It would not be seemly, in this connection, to give a verbatim report of the conversations of us boys when we assembled at our rendezvous after school.  Suffice it to say that the teacher’s ears must have burned.  The consensus of opinion was that, if the teacher didn’t want the desks carved, he should not have told us to carve them.  We seemed to think that he had said, in substance, that he knew we were a gang of young rascallions, and that, if he didn’t intimidate us, we’d surely be guilty of some form of vandalism.  Then he proceeded to point out the way by suggesting penknives; and the trick was done.  We were ever open to suggestions.

We had another teacher whose pet aversion was match heads.  Cicero and Demosthenes would have apologized to him could they have come in when he was delivering one of his eloquent orations upon this engaging theme.  His vituperative vocabulary seemed unlimited, inexhaustible, and cumulative.  He raved, and ranted, and exuded epithets with the most lavish prodigality.  It seemed to us that he didn’t care much what he said, if he could only say it rapidly and forcibly.  In the very midst of an eloquent period another match head would explode under his foot, and that seemed to answer the purpose of an encore.  The class in arithmetic did not recite that afternoon.  There was no time for arithmetic when match heads were to the fore.  I sometimes feel a bit guilty that I was admitted to such a good show on a free pass.  The next day, of course, the Gatling guns resumed their activity; the girls screeched as they walked toward the water-pail to get a drink; we boys studied our geography lesson with faces garbed in a look of innocence and wonder; our mothers at home were wondering what had become of all the matches; and the teacher—­but the less said of him the better.

We boys needed only the merest suggestion to set us in motion, and like Dame Rumor in the Aeneid, we gathered strength by the going.  One day the teacher became somewhat facetious and recounted a red-pepper episode in the school of his boyhood.  That was enough for us; and the next day, in our school, was a day long to be remembered.  I recall in the school reader the story of “Meddlesome Matty.”  Her name was really Matilda.  One day her curiosity got the better of her, and she removed the lid from her grandmother’s snuff-box.  The story goes on to say: 

  “Poor eyes, and nose, and mouth, and chin
  A dismal sight presented;
  And as the snuff got further in
  Sincerely she repented.”

Barring the element of repentance, the red pepper was equally provocative of results in our school.

I certainly cannot lay claim to any great degree of docility, for, in spite of all the experiences of my boyhood, I fell into the evil ways of my teachers when I began my schoolmastering, and suggested to my pupils numberless short cuts to wrong-doing.  I railed against intoxicants, and thus made them curious.  That’s why I am led to wonder if I have incited any of my boys to strong drink as my teachers incited me to desk-carving, match heads, and red pepper.