I feel a pity for poor Sisyphus, poor fellow, rolling that stone to the top of the hill, and then having to do the work all over when the stone rolled to the bottom.  But that is not much worse than trying to teach Caribbean Sea and Mt.  Vesuvius, if we can’t really believe in them.  But here is Brown, metamorphosed into a psychologist who begins with the known, yea, delightfully known grapefruit which I had at breakfast, and takes me on a fascinating excursion till I arrive, by alluring stages, at the related unknown, the Caribbean Sea.  Too bad that Brown isn’t a teacher.

Brown has the gift of holding on to a thing till his craving for knowledge is satisfied.  Somewhere he had come upon some question touching a campanile or, possibly, the Campanile, as it seemed to him.  Nor would he rest content until I had extracted what the books have to say on the subject.  He had in mind the Campanile at Venice, not knowing that the one beside the Duomo at Florence is higher than the one at Venice, and that the Leaning Tower at Pisa is a campanile, or bell-tower, also.  When I told him that one of my friends saw the Campanile at Venice crumble to a heap of ruins on that Sunday morning back in 1907, and that another friend had been of the last party to go to the top of it the evening before, he became quite excited, and then I knew that I had succeeded in investing the subject with human interest, and I felt quite the schoolmaster.  Nothing of this did I mention to Brown, for there is no need to exploit the mental machinery if only you get results.

Many people who travel abroad buy postcards by the score, and seem to feel that they are the original discoverers of the places which these cards portray, and yet these very places were the background of much of their history and geography in the schools.  Can it be that their teachers failed to invest these places with human interest, that they were but words in a book and not real to them at all?  Must I travel all the way to Yellowstone Park to know a geyser?  Alas! in that case, many of us poor school-teachers must go through life geyserless.  Wondrous tales and oft heard I in my school-days of glacier, iceberg, canyon, snow-covered mountain, grotto, causeway, and volcano, but not till I came to Grindelwald did I really know what a glacier is.  There’s many a Doubting Thomas in the schools.

CHAPTER IV

PSYCHOLOGICAL

The psychologist is so insistent in proclaiming his doctrine of negative self-feeling and positive self-feeling that one is impelled to listen out of curiosity, if nothing else.  Then, just as you are beginning to get a little glimmering as to his meaning, another one begins to assail your ears with a deal of sesquipedalian English about the emotion of subjection and the emotion of elation.  Just as I began to think I was getting a grip of the thing a college chap came in and proceeded