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.

The last day of every month would I fetch that scrolled note to Mr. Carvel, and he laid it beside his plate until dinner was over.  And then, as sure as the sun rose that morning, my flogging would come before it set.  This done with, and another promised next month provided Mr. Daaken wrote no better of me, my grandfather and I renewed our customary footing of love and companionship.

But Mr. Daaken, unwittingly or designedly, taught other things than those I have mentioned above.  And though I never once heard a word of politics fall from his lips, his school shortly became known to all good Tories as a nursery of conspiracy and sedition.  There are other ways of teaching besides preaching, and of that which the dominie taught best he spoke not a word.  He was credited, you may well believe, with calumnies against King George, and once my Uncle Grafton and Mr. Dulany were for clapping him in jail, avowing that he taught treason to the young.  I can account for the tone of King William’s School in no other way than to say that patriotism was in the very atmosphere, and seemed to exude in some mysterious way from Mr. Daaken’s person.  And most of us became infected with it.