lothes overcame his feeling of
getting something for nothing. If he hadn't given the state anything, he
had at least expended something--a good deal in fact--on the state's
account.

CHAPTER XIX

JIM'S WORLD WIDENS

Mr. Hofmyer was waiting to give Jim the final convincing proof that he had
produced an effect with his speech.

"Do you teach the kind of school you lay out in your talk?" he asked.

"I try to," said Jim, "and I believe I do."

"Well," said Mr. Hofmyer, "that's the kind of education I b'lieve in. I
kep' school back in Pennsylvany fifty years ago, and I made the scholars
measure things, and weigh things, and apply their studies as fur as I
could."

"All good teachers have always done that," said Jim. "Froebel, Pestalozzi,
Colonel Parker--they all had the idea which is at the bottom of my work;
'learn to do by doing,' and connecting up the school with life."

"M'h'm," grunted Mr. Hofmyer, "I hain't been able to see how Latin
connects up with a high-school kid's life--unless he can find a Latin
settlement som'eres and git a job clerkin' in a store."

"But it used to relate to life," said Jim, "the life of the people who
made Greek and Latin a part of everybody else's education as well as their
own. Latin and Greek were the only languages in which anything worth much
was written, you know. But now"--Jim spread out his arms as if to take in
the whole world--"science, the marvelous literature of our tongue in the
last three centuries! And to make a child learn Latin with all that, a
thousand times richer than all the literature of Latin, lying unused
before him!"

"Know any Latin?" asked Mr. Hofmyer.

Jim blushed, as one caught in condemning what he knows nothing about.

"I--I have studied the grammar, and read _Caesar_," he faltered, "but that
isn't much. I had no teacher, and I had to work pretty hard, and it didn't
go very well."

"I've had all the Latin they gave in the colleges of my time," said Mr.
Hofmyer, "if I do talk dialect; and I'll agree with you so far as to say
that it would have been a crime for me to neglect the chemistry,
bacteriology, physics, engineering and other sciences that pertain to
farmin'--if there'd been any such sciences when I was gettin' my
schoolin'."

"And yet," said Jim, "some people want us to guide ourselves by the
courses of study made before these sciences existed."

"I don't, by hokey!" said Mr. Hofmyer. "I'll be dag-goned if you ain't
right. I wo