iciently to speak, "so
you were going home, were you?"

"Yes," said young Willard, as his head emerged from the drift, looking
like an animated snow-ball, "and I would have reached there, too, if I
hadn't slipped."

This was all that was said, at the time, but as Mr. Carter led his
prisoner back, an explanation took place, in which the lad so strongly
insisted that his escapade arose from a sense of the gross injustice
done him, that Carter's own sense of right was touched, and after
admonishing the boy to take a different mode of redressing his
grievances in the future, he agreed to forego the flogging and let
Master Willard finish the remainder of the session in the customary way.

After this occurrence, Willard got along very well under the tuition of
Mr. Carter, and it was not until some years later, when a gentleman by
the name of Nichols took charge of the school, that anything transpired
worthy of note.

James Nichols was a devout believer in Solomon's maxim that to spare the
rod is to spoil the child. The whip was his arbiter in all differences
which arose between his pupils and himself. He never paused, as Mr.
Montieth has lately done, to consider that at least two-thirds of the
offences for which children are flogged at school are "crimes for which
they are in nowise responsible," and "when stripped of the color given
to them by senseless and unmeaning rules, they are simply the crimes of
being a boy and being a girl," and are "incited by bad air, cold feet,
overwork and long confinement; crimes which the parents of these same
children are accustomed to excuse in themselves, when they sit in
church, by the dulness of the sermon, or other circumstances that offend
against nature and which they sometimes soothe with fennel or hartshorn,
or change of position, and not unseldom with sleep." In school
discipline Mr. Nichols was a pure materialist. He never realized
Cayley's profound lesson that "education is not the mere storing a
youthful memory with a bundle of facts which it neither digests nor
assimilates," but that it is the formation and training of a mind. Under
his _regime_ the rod ruled everything. Even the offence of whispering
was punished by the lash.

Upon one occasion, when young Willard was seated between two
brothers--Henry and Brayton Abbott by name--engaged in solving Algebraic
problems, a whispered inquiry, regarding the lesson, passed from one to
the other.

Mr. Nichols at the moment hap