bian students, squatting on the
floor, gabbling loud uncomprehended texts from the Koran; but the
sight of Sylvia's companions bending over their school-books with
glazed, vacant eyes, rocking back and forth as a rhythmical aid to
memorizing, their lips moving silently as they repeated over and over,
gabblingly, the phrases of the printed page, might have inclined a
hypothetical visitor from Mars to share the bewildered amusement of
the American visitors to Moslem schools. Sylvia rocked and twisted a
favorite button, gabbled silently, and recited fluently with the rest,
being what was known as an apt and satisfactory pupil. In company with
the other children she thus learned to say, in answer to questions,
that seven times seven is forty-nine; that the climate of Brazil is
hot and moist; that the capital of Arkansas is Little Rock; and that
"through" is spelled with three misleading and superfluous letters.

What she really learned was, as with her mates, another matter--for,
of course, those devouringly active little minds did not spend six
hours a day in school without learning something incessantly. The few
rags and tatters of book-information they acquired were but the
merest fringes on the great garment of learning acquired by these
public-school children, which was to wrap them about all their lives.
What they learned during those eight years of sitting still and not
whispering had nothing to do with the books in their desks or the lore
in their teachers' brains. The great impression stamped upon the wax
of their minds, which became iron in after years, was democracy--a
crude, distorted, wavering image of democracy, like every image an
ideal in this imperfect world, but in its essence a reflection of the
ideal of their country. No European could have conceived how literally
it was true that the birth or wealth or social position of a child
made no difference in the estimation of his mates. There were no
exceptions to the custom of considering the individual on his own
merits. These merits were often queerly enough imagined, a faculty for
standing on his head redounding as much, or more, to a boy's credit as
the utmost brilliance in recitation, or generosity of temperament, but
at least he was valued for something he himself could do, and not for
any fortuitous incidents of birth and fortune.

Furthermore there lay back of these four hundred children, who shaped
their world to this rough-and-ready imitation of dem