r's desk.

And now school is begun. What a murmur of multitudinous tongues, like
the whispering leaves of a wind-stirred oak, as the scholars con over
their various tasks! Buzz! buzz! buzz! Amid just such a murmur has
Master Cheever spent above sixty years; and long habit has made it as
pleasant to him as the hum of a beehive when the insects are busy in the
sunshine.

Now a class in Latin is called to recite. Forth steps a rowel
queer-looking little fellows, wearing square-skirted coats and
small-clothes, with buttons at the knee. They look like so many
grandfathers in their second-childhood. These lads are to be sent to
Cambridge and educated for the learned professions. Old Master Cheever
had lived so long, and seen so many generations of school-boys grow up
to be men, that now he can almost prophesy what sort of a man each boy
will be. One urchin shall hereafter be a doctor, and administer pills
and potions, and stalk gravely through life, perfumed with assafoetida.
Another shall wrangle at the bar, and fight his way to wealth and honors
and, in his declining age, shall be a worshipful member of his Majesty's
council. A third-and he is the master's favorite--shall be a worthy
successor to the old Puritan ministers now in their graves; he shall
preach with great unction and effect, and leave volumes of sermons, in
print and manuscript, for the benefit of future generations.

But, as they are merely school-boys now, their business is to construe
Virgil. Poor Virgil! whose verses, which he took so much pains to
polish, have been misscanned, and misparsed, and misinterpreted by so
many generations of idle school-boys. There, sit down, ye Latinists. Two
or three of you, I fear, are doomed to feel the master's ferule.

Next comes a class in arithmetic. These boys are to be the merchants,
shopkeepers, and mechanics of a future period. Hitherto they have traded
only in marbles and apples. Hereafter some will send vessels to England
for broadcloths and all sorts of manufactured wares, and to the
West Indies for sugar, and rum, and coffee. Others will stand behind
counters, and measure tape, and ribbon, and cambric by the yard. Others
will upheave the blacksmith's hammer, or drive the plane over the
carpenter's bench, or take the lapstone and the awl and learn the
trade of shoemaking. Many will follow the sea, and become bold, rough
sea-captains.

This class of boys, in short, must supply the world with those active,
sk