ing me that I am doing easy work for big pay I would conclude that I might as well order my ascension robe ‘immediately and to onct.’ ‘Well, you get your money easy,’ some rate-payer will tell me, condescendingly. ‘All you have to do is to sit there and hear lessons.’ I used to argue the matter at first, but I’m wiser now. Facts are stubborn things, but as some one has wisely said, not half so stubborn as fallacies. So I only smile loftily now in eloquent silence. Why, I have nine grades in my school and I have to teach a little of everything, from investigating the interiors of earthworms to the study of the solar system. My youngest pupil is four—his mother sends him to school to ‘get him out of the way’—and my oldest twenty—it ‘suddenly struck him’ that it would be easier to go to school and get an education than follow the plough any longer. In the wild effort to cram all sorts of research into six hours a day I don’t wonder if the children feel like the little boy who was taken to see the biograph. ‘I have to look for what’s coming next before I know what went last,’ he complained. I feel like that myself.
“And the letters I get, Anne! Tommy’s mother writes me that Tommy is not coming on in arithmetic as fast as she would like. He is only in simple reduction yet, and Johnny Johnson is in fractions, and Johnny isn’t half as smart as her Tommy, and she can’t understand it. And Susy’s father wants to know why Susy can’t write a letter without misspelling half the words, and Dick’s aunt wants me to change his seat,
