I don't know my letters yit!"

Master Cobb called the school to order and proceeded to ask the names
and ages of his pupils. When Zack's turn came, the old fellow replied
promptly:

"Zack Lurvey, fifty-eight years, five months and eighteen days."

"Zack?" the master queried in some perplexity. "Does that stand for
Zachary? How do you spell it?"

"I never spelled it," old Zack replied with a grin. "I'm here to larn
how. Fact is, I'm jest a leetle backward."

The young master began to realize that he was in for something
extraordinary. In truth, he had the time of his life there that winter.
Not that old Zack misbehaved; on the contrary, he was a model of
studiousness and was very anxious to learn. But education went hard with
him at first; he was more than a week in learning his letters and sat by
the hour, making them on a slate, muttering them aloud, sometimes
vehemently, with painful groans. M and W gave him constant trouble; and
so did B and R. He grew so wrathful over his mistakes at times that he
thumped the desk with his fist, and once he hurled his primer at the
stove.

"Why did they make the measly little things look so much alike!" he
cried.

He wished to skip the letters altogether and to learn to read by the
looks of the words; but the master assured him that he must learn the
alphabet first if he wished to learn to write later, and finally he
prevailed with the stubborn old man.

"Well, I do want to larn," old Zack replied. "I'm goin' the whole hog,
ef it kills me!"

And apparently it did pretty near kill him; at any rate he perspired
over his work and at times was near shedding tears.

Certain of the letters he drew on paper with a lead pencil and pasted on
the back of his hands, so as to keep them in sight. One day he tore the
alphabet out of his primer and put it into the crown of his cap--"to see
ef it wouldn't soak in," he said. When, after a hard struggle, he was
able to get three letters together and spell cat, c-a-t, he was so much
pleased that he clapped his hands and shouted, "Scat!" at the top of his
voice.

The effect of such performances on a roomful of small boys and girls was
not conducive to good order. It was only with difficulty that the young
master could hear lessons or induce his pupils to study. Old Zack was
the center of attraction for every juvenile eye.

It was when the old fellow first began to write his name, or try to, in
his copy book, that he caused the greatest