These wise ones lay down a law (take up almost any printed course of study, nowadays, and you will find it all spread out in the first and second years’ work) that every number must be mastered, in all its possible arrangements and combinations, from the very first time it is taken up.  Thus, one must be considered in all its possible correlations to all the universe, and the Almighty Himself, before two can be touched!  So, as soon as the youth strikes a simple unit that ought to come to him like an old friend, he is straightway packed off to the ends of the earth with the digit and made to stand it up alongside of all manner of things, in the heavens above and, the earth beneath, and even in the waters under the earth.  The little fellow tramps, and trudges, and compares, and contrasts, and divides, and combines, and eliminates, and expels, and extracts, and subtracts, and retracts, and contracts, and what not, until finally, he gets all mixed up and concludes that he never can know anything about it at all, and the dear old “one,” that came to him at first as such a simple thing, is so tangled up with all creation that he gives it up as an entirely unknown and unknowable quantity, and begins to guess at it and when he comes to that point, look out!  He has taken the first step in recklessness, and has begun his initial work as a liar!

You don’t believe this?  Then sit down to the following, which I clip from the “second year’s work” in a “course of study” that lies before me: 

“Learn to count to 100, forward and back, by 1’s, 2’s, 3’s, 4’s, 5’s, 6’s, 7’s, 8’s, and 9’s, beginning to count from 0, and also from each digit, respectively, up to the one used continuously, in each case.”

Just buckle down to this for a while and see how it goes.  See how long it will take you to master even a tithe of this, so that you can do it, even passably well, and then compare your own powers of mind with those of the child that you would fain cram with this “course” and see if there is not a reason why the children do not take to this “method.”

I know what you will say, at least to yourselves.  “I have no time for such a pile of rubbish.”  You say well.  Neither have the children time for it.

But Amy knew nothing of Grube, thank heaven, and gave none of it to “Dodd.”  He learned to read better than ever, learned to spell, and took pride in standing at the head of his class.  He plucked flowers for his teacher as he went to school, and his cheeks flushed as she took them from his band and set them in the glass tumbler on the table.  He even thought in his little heart, betimes, that, when he got grown up, he would marry Amy!  Rather young for such ideas?  Perhaps so; but these ideas begin to develop, often, when boys are very young.  They don’t say anything about it, out loud; but away down in the deep hiding-places of the heart—­oh, well, we all know how it is, and what an influence such notions may have upon our lives.