of November. The short space of time which we
had before us, rendered every moment precious.
We divided the day into three parts. The first
was from sunrise to eleven o’clock, when we
breakfasted. The second from noon to sunset, when
we supped. The third from supper till ten or
eleven o’clock at night, making in all fourteen
or fifteen hours of study in the twenty-four.
We devoted much of this time to lessons in reading,
which the wretched manner in which they had been taught,
their detestable accent, and strange tone of voice,
rendered a most necessary, but tiresome duty.
The grammar, too, of which not one of them had the
least idea, occupied much of our time. People
who have been brought up in towns, can have no conception
of the difficulty which mountaineers and rustics, whose
ideas are confined to those objects only to which
they have been familiarized, find in learning this
branch of science. There is scarcely any way
of conveying the meaning of it to them. All the
usual terms and definitions, and the means which are
commonly employed in schools, are utterly unintelligible
here. But the curious and novel devices which
must be employed, have this advantage,—that
they exercise their understanding, and help to form
their judgment. Dictation was one of the methods
to which I had recourse: without it they would
have made no progress in grammar and orthography;
but they wrote so miserably and slowly, that this
consumed a great portion of valuable time. Observing
that they were ignorant of the signification of a great
number of French words, of constant use and recurrence,
I made a selection from the vocabulary, and I set
them to write down in little copy-books,[14] words
which were in most frequent use; but the explanations
contained in the dictionary were not enough, and I
was obliged to rack my brain for new and brief definitions
which they could understand, and to make them transcribe
these. Arithmetic was another branch of knowledge
which required many a weary hour. Geography was
considered a matter of recreation after dinner:
and they pored over the maps with a feeling of delight
and amusement, which was quite new to them. I
also busied myself in giving them some notions of
the sphere, and of the form and motion of the earth;
of the seasons and the climates, and of the heavenly
bodies. Every thing of this sort was as perfectly
novel to them, as it would have been to the islanders
of Otaheite; and even the elementary books, which
are usually put into the hands of children, were at
first as unintelligible as the most abstruse treatises
on mathematics. I was consequently forced to
use the simplest, and plainest modes of demonstration;
but these amused and instructed them at the same time.
A ball made of the box tree, with a hole through it,
and moving on an axle, and on which I had traced the
principal circles; some large potatoes hollowed out;
a candle, and sometimes the skulls of my scholars,
served for the instruments, by which I illustrated