ter at law, as well as physically,
and he has got the money to fight with."

The proceedings hung fire for a week or more. The school board sent an
order to the master not to hear old Zack's lessons or to give him any
instructions whatever. But the old fellow came to school just the same,
and poor Cobb had to get along with him as best he could. The school
board was not eager again to try putting him out by force, and it seemed
that nothing less than the state militia could oust him from the
schoolhouse; and that would need an order from the governor of the
state! On the whole, public opinion rather favored his being allowed to
pay his tuition and to go to school if he felt the need of it.

At any rate, he went to school there all winter and made remarkable
progress. In the course of ten weeks he could read slowly, and he knew
most of the short words in his primer and second reader by sight. Longer
words he would not try to pronounce, but called them, each and all,
"jackass" as fast as he came to them.

In consequence his reading aloud was highly ambiguous. He could write
his name slowly and with many grimaces.

Figures, for some reason, came much easier to him than the alphabet. He
learned the numerals in a few days, and by the fifth or sixth week of
school he could add and subtract on his slate. But the multiplication
table gave him serious trouble. The only way he succeeded in learning it
at all was by singing it. After he began to do sums in multiplication on
his slate, he was likely to burst forth singing in school hours:

"Seven times eight are fifty-six
--and carry five.
Seven times nine are sixty-three
--and carry seven.
No, no, no, no, carry six!"

"But, Mr. Lurvey, you must keep quiet in school!" the afflicted master
remonstrated for the hundredth time. "No one else can study."

"But I can't!" old Zack would reply. "'Twouldn't come to me 'less I sung
it!"

Toward the last weeks of the term he was able to multiply with
considerable accuracy and to divide in short division. Long division he
did not attempt, but he rapidly learned to cast interest at six per
cent. He had had a way of arriving at that with beans, before he came to
school; and no one had ever succeeded in cheating him. He knew about
interest money, he said, by "sense of feeling."

Grammar he saw no use for, and did not bother himself with it; but,
curiously enough, he was delighted with geography and toward the