nflicting pain that a fiend might shrink
from giving. My boy lived in an anguish of fear lest somehow he should
come under that rod of his; but he was rather fond of the teacher, and
so were all the boys. The teacher took a real interest in their studies,
and if he whipped them well, he taught them well; and at most times he
was kind and friendly with them. Anyway, he did not blister your hand
with a ruler, as some teachers did, or make you stand bent forward from
the middle, with your head hanging down, so that the blood all ran into
it. Under him my boy made great advances in reading and writing, and he
won some distinction in declamation; but the old difficulties with the
arithmetic remained. He failed to make anything out of the parts of
speech in his grammar; but one afternoon, while he sat in his stocking
feet, trying to ease the chilblains which every boy used to have from
his snow-soaked boots, before the days of india-rubbers, he found
something in the back of his grammar which made him forget all about the
pain. This was a part called Prosody, and it told how to make verses;
explained the feet, the accents, the stanzas--everything that had
puzzled him in his attempts to imitate the poems he had heard his father
read aloud. He was amazed; he had never imagined that such a science
existed, and yet here it was printed out, with each principle reduced to
practice. He conceived of its reasons at the first reading, so that I
suppose nature had not dealt so charily with him concerning the rules of
prosody as the rules of arithmetic; and he lost no time in applying them
in a poem of his own. The afternoon air was heavy with the heat that
quivered visibly above the great cast-iron wood stove in the centre of
the schoolroom; the boys drowsed in their seats, or hummed sleepily over
their lessons; the chilblains gnawed away at the poet's feet, but heaven
had opened to him, and he was rapt far from all the world of sense. The
music which he had followed through those poems his father read was no
longer a mystery; he had its key, its secret; he might hope to wield its
charm, to lay its spell upon others. He wrote his poem, which was
probably a simple, unconscious imitation of something that had pleased
him in his school-reader, and carried it proudly home with him. But
here he met with that sort of disappointment which more than any other
dismays and baffles authorship; a difference in the point of view. His
father said the v