It is a winter’s day when we take our peep into the school-room.  See what great logs of wood have been rolled into the fire-place, and what a broad, bright blaze goes leaping up the chimney!  And every few moments, a vast cloud of smoke is puffed into the room, which sails slowly over the heads of the scholars, until it gradually settles upon the walls and ceiling.  They are blackened with the smoke of many years already.

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Next, look at our old historic chair!  It is placed, you perceive, in the most comfortable part of the room, where the generous glow of the fire is sufficiently felt, without being too intensely hot.  How stately the old chair looks, as if it remembered its many famous occupants, but yet were conscious that a greater man is sitting in it now!  Do you see the venerable school-master, severe in aspect, with a black scull-cap on his head, like an ancient Puritan, and the snow of his white beard drifting down to his very girdle?  What boy would dare to play, or whisper, or even glance aside from his book, while Master Cheever is on the look-out, behind his spectacles!  For such offenders, if any such there be, a rod of birch is hanging over the fire-place, and a heavy ferule lies on the master’s desk.

And now school is begun.  What a murmur of multitudinous tongues, like the whispering leaves of a wind-stirred oak, as the scholars con over their various tasks!  Buz, buz, buz!  Amid just such a murmur has Master Cheever spent above sixty years:  and long habit has made it as pleasant to him as the hum of a bee-hive, when the insects are busy in the sunshine.

Now a class in Latin is called to recite.  Forth steps a row of queer-looking little fellows, wearing square-skirted coats, and small clothes, with buttons at the knee.  They look like so many grandfathers in their second childhood.  These lads are to be sent to Cambridge, and educated for the learned professions.  Old Master Cheever has lived so long, and seen so many generations of school-boys grow up to be men, that now he can almost prophesy what sort of a man each boy will be.  One urchin shall hereafter be a doctor, and administer pills and potions, and stalk gravely through life, perfumed with assaf[oe]tida.  Another shall wrangle at the bar, and fight his way to wealth and honors, and in his declining age, shall be a worshipful member of his Majesty’s council.  A third—­and he is the Master’s favorite—­shall be a worthy successor to the old Puritan ministers, now in their graves; he shall preach with great unction and effect, and leave volumes of sermons, in print and manuscript, for the benefit of future generations.

But, as they are merely school-boys now, their business is to construe Virgil.  Poor Virgil, whose verses, which he took so much pains to polish, have been mis-scanned, and mis-parsed, and mis-interpreted, by so many generations of idle school-boys!  There, sit down, ye Latinists.  Two or three of you, I fear, are doomed to feel the master’s ferule.