Thomas and Catherine Edwards coming
over across the field to join us. To save her carpet, grandmother Ruth
put down burlap to bear the brunt of our many restless feet--for there
was a great deal of trampling and sometimes outbreaks of scuffling
there.

Thomas and I, who had forgotten much we had learned the previous winter,
were still delving in _AEsop's Fables_. But Addison, Theodora and
Catherine were going on with the first book of Caesar's _Gallic War_.
Ellen, two years younger, was still occupied wholly by her English
studies. Study hours were from seven till ten, with interludes for
apples and pop-corn.

Halstead, who had now definitely abandoned Latin as something which
would never do him any good, took up Comstock's _Natural Philosophy_, or
made a feint of doing so, in order to have something of his own that was
different from the rest of us. Natural philosophy, he declared, was far
and away more important than Latin.

Memory goes back very fondly to those evenings in the old sitting-room,
they were so illumined by great hopes ahead. Thomas and I, at a
light-stand apart from the others, were usually puzzling out a
Fable--_The Lion, The Oxen, The Kid and the Wolf, The Fox and the Lion_,
or some one of a dozen others--holding noisy arguments over it till
Master Pierson from the large center table, called out, "Less noise over
there among those Latin infants! Caesar is building his bridge over the
Rhine. You are disturbing him."

Addison, always very quiet when engrossed in study, scarcely noticed or
looked up, unless perhaps to aid Catherine and Theodora for a moment,
with some hard passage. It was Tom and I who made Latin noisy,
aggravated at times by pranks from Halstead, whose studies in natural
philosophy were by no means diligent. At intervals of assisting us with
our translations of Caesar and the Fables, Master Pierson himself was
translating the Greek of Demosthenes' Orations, and also reviewing his
Livy--to keep up with his Class at College. But, night or day, he was
always ready to help or advise us, and push us on. "Go ahead!" was "old
Joel's" motto, and "That's what we're here for." He appeared to be
possessed by a profound conviction that the human race has a great
destiny before it, and that we ought all to work hard to hurry it up and
realize it.

It is quite wonderful what an influence for good a wide-awake teacher,
like Master Pierson, can exert in a school of forty or fifty boys and
girls