“Tis a monstrous state, indeed, when I have to beg you for a reel!” says she.

And so was I made happy.

CHAPTER VI

I FIRST SUFFER FOR THE CAUSE

In the eighteenth century the march of public events was much more eagerly followed than now by men and women of all stations, and even children.  Each citizen was ready, nay, forward, in taking an active part in all political movements, and the children mimicked their elders.  Old William Farris read his news of a morning before he began the mending of his watches, and by evening had so well digested them that he was primed for discussion with Pryse, of the opposite persuasion, at the Rose and Crown.  Sol Mogg, the sexton of St. Anne’s, had his beloved Gazette in his pocket as he tolled the church bell of a Thursday, and would hold forth on the rights and liberties of man with the carpenter who mended the steeple.  Mrs. Willard could talk of Grenville and Townshend as knowingly as her husband, the rich factor, and Francie Willard made many a speech to us younger Sons of Liberty on the steps of King William’s School.  We younger sons, indeed, declared bitter war against the mother-country long before our conservative old province ever dreamed of secession.  For Maryland was well pleased with his Lordship’s government.

I fear that I got at King William’s School learning of a far different sort than pleased my grandfather.  In those days the school stood upon the Stadt House hill near School Street, not having moved to its present larger quarters.  Mr. Isaac Daaken was then Master, and had under him some eighty scholars.  After all these years, Mr. Daaken stands before me a prominent figure of the past in an ill-fitting suit of snuff colour.  How well I recall that schoolroom of a bright morning, the sun’s rays shot hither and thither, and split violet, green, and red by the bulging glass panes of the windows.  And by a strange irony it so chanced that where the dominie sat—­and he moved not the whole morning long save to reach for his birches—­the crimson ray would often rest on the end of his long nose, and the word “rum” be passed tittering along the benches.  For some men are born to the mill, and others to the mitre, and still others to the sceptre; but Mr. Daaken was born to the birch.  His long, lanky legs were made for striding after culprits, and his arms for caning them.  He taught, among other things, the classics, of course, the English language grammatically, arithmetic in all its branches, book-keeping in the Italian manner, and the elements of algebra, geometry, and trigonometry with their applications to surveying and navigation.  He also wrote various sorts of hands, fearful and marvellous to the uninitiated, with which he was wont to decorate my monthly reports to my grandfather.  I can shut my eyes and see now that wonderful hyperbola in the C in Carvel, which, after travelling around the paper, ended in intricate curves and a flourish which surely must have broken the quill.