Well do I remember going to a neighbor, whose farm was mortgaged for all it was worth to buy finery and pay tuition bills in said academy, and begging for the services of the daughter to help my sick mother.  I was refused with insult and scorn.  “Do you think,” shrieked the irate virago, “that I will allow my daughter who is studying French, Latin, Greek, and German to wash your dirty dishes?” I was driven from the house at the point of the boot.  That daughter is to-day shaking and twitching with St. Vitus’s dance, a physical and mental wreck from overstudy, causing nervous exhaustion and despair.

Hundreds of girls throughout our country who might have been good housekeepers, are to-day useless invalids, made so by what is called “higher education.”  Hundreds of boys, who might have become successful farmers and mechanics, are now dissipating in beer shops while waiting in vain for lily-fingered positions as bookkeepers or teachers.  In scores of New England towns, one man, employed to fill the heads of a reluctant few with the dead languages, receives more salary than all the other teachers combined.

It seems to require a surgical operation to get the fact through our thick heads, that our school system demands radical reform from top to bottom to the end that hands as well as heads may receive technical bread-and-butter, practical education.

I was a victim of this elective-study craze, and with the usual stupidity displayed by a child when left to decide what he shall do, I chose Latin as my principal study in this common district school, because I fancied it smacked of erudition.

The teacher, knowing no more than myself of the language, set me to committing to memory the whole of Andrews’ Latin Grammar.  I gained the important information that “sto, fido, confido, assuesco, and preditus” govern the ablative, and other valuable lore; but when I asked the teacher where the Latin vernacular came in, she replied that that would come to me later—­that I must “open my mouth and shut my eyes while she gave me something to make me wise.”  A solemn awe not unmixed with envy pervaded the schoolroom as I, parrot-like, rattled off this valueless jargon of a people dead for hundreds of years.

As this study possessed no interest for me, I naturally dropped into mischief, and being caught one day with a distorted picture of the teacher on my slate with the following suggestive poem lines beneath it:—­“Savage by name and savage by nature, I hope the Lord will take your breath before you lick us all to death,”—­I was chased about the room by the angry pedagoguess until I leaped through the back window, and the hole made in the bank by my head is pointed out to this day as a warning to recalcitrant pupils.

[Illustration:  “Floating ’Neath the Trees of Mill River.”]