ived. The boy
who fails to get oats in the classroom to-day, will shy off from the
teacher to-morrow. He will not even accept her statement that there
is oats in the pail, for yesterday the pail was empty--nothing but
sound.

But even with pail and oats I had to go to the colt, getting my shoes
soiled and my clothes torn, but there was no other way. I must begin
where the colt (or boy) is, as the book on pedagogy says. I wanted
to stay on the hill where everything was agreeable, but that wouldn't
get the colt. Now, if Mr. Charles H. Judd cares to elaborate this
outline, I urge no objection and shall not claim the protection of
copyright. I shall be only too glad to have him make clear to all of
us the pedagogical recipe for catching colts and boys.

CHAPTER II

RETROSPECT

Mr. Patrick Henry was probably correct in saying that there is no way
of judging the future but by the past, and, to my thinking, he might
well have included the present along with the future. Today is
better or worse than yesterday or some other day in the past, just as
this cherry pie is better or worse than some past cherry pie. But
even this pie may seem a bit less glorious than the pies of the past,
because of my jaded appetite--a fact that is easily lost sight of.
Folks who extol the glories of the good old times may be forgetting
that they are not able to relive the emotions that put the zest into
those past events. We used to go to "big meeting" in a two-horse
sled, with the wagon-body half filled with hay and heaped high with
blankets and robes. The mercury might be low in the tube, but we
recked not of that. Our indifference to climatic conditions was not
due alone to the wealth of robes and blankets, but the proximity of
another member of the human family may have had something to do with
it. If we could reconstruct the emotional life of those good old
times, the physical conditions would take their rightful place as a
background.

If we could only bring back the appetite of former years we might
find this pie better than the pies of old. The good brother who
seems to think the textbooks of his boyhood days were better than the
modern ones forgets that along with the old-time textbooks went
skating, rabbit-hunting, snowballing, coasting, fishing, sock-up,
bull-pen, two-old-cat, townball, and shinny-on-the-ice. He is
probably confusing those majors with the text-book minor. His
criticism of things and books moder