[Illustration:  THE BATTLE OF CANNAE.]

After consuming the supplies they went to the windows and made disagreeable remarks to the Carthaginians, who were standing in the yard, and dared old Barnes to bring the foe once more into battle array.  Then Barnes went for a policeman; and when he knocked at the door, it was opened, and all the Romans were found busy studying their lessons.  When Barnes came in with the defeated troops he went for Scipio Africanus; and pulling him out of his seat by the ear, he thrashed that great military genius with a rattan until Scipio began to cry, whereupon Barnes dropped him and began to paddle Caius Gracchus.  Then things settled down in the old way, and next morning Barnes announced that history in the future would be studied as it always had been; and he wrote a note to the Educational Monthly to say that in his opinion the man who suggested the new system ought to be led out and shot.  The boys do not now take as much interest in Roman history as they did on that day.

* * * * *

The young tragedian who represented Scipio Africanus is named Smith.  His family came to the village to live only a few weeks before the school opened.  Scipio is a very enterprising and ingenious lad.  Colonel Coffin’s boy leaned over the fence one day and gave to me his impressions of Scipio, a lad about fourteen years old: 

“Yes, me and him are right well acquainted now; he knows more’n I do, and he’s had more experience.  Bill says his father used to be a robber (Smith, by the way, is a deacon in the Presbyterian church, and a very excellent lawyer), and that he has ten million dollars in gold buried in his cellar, along with a whole lot of human bones—­people he’s killed.  And he says his father is a conjurer, and that he makes all the earthquakes that happen anywheres in the world.  The old man’ll come home at night, after there’s been an earthquake, all covered with perspiration and so tired he kin hardly stand.  Bill says it’s such hard work.

“And Bill tole me that once when a man came around there trying to sell lightning-rods his father got mad and et him—­et him right up; and he takes bites out of everybody he comes acrost.

“That’s what Bill tells me.  That’s all I know about it.  And he tole me that once he used to have a dog—­one of these little kind of dogs—­and he was flying his kite, and just for fun he tied the kite-string onto his dog’s tail.  And then the wind struck her and his dog went a-scuddin’ down the street with his hind legs in the air for about a mile, when the kite all of a sudden begun to go up, and in about a minute the dog was fifteen miles high and commanding a view of California and Egypt, I think Bill said.  He came down, anyhow, I know, in Brazil, and Bill said he swum home all the way in the Atlantic Ocean; and when he landed, his legs were all nibbled off by sharks.