ch all of our longed-for ships are to come
in, is setting to the school-house. Oh, what is martial glory, what is
conquest of an empire, what is state-craft alongside of this? Happy is
the people that is in such a case!

The city schools are now the pattern for the country schools: but in
my day, although a little they were pouring the new wine of frothing
educational reform into the old bottles, they had not quite attained the
full distention of this present. We still had some kind of a good
time, but nothing like the good times they had out at the school near
grandpap's, where I sometimes visited. There you could whisper! Yes,
sir, you could whisper. So long as you didn't talk out loud, it was all
right. And there was no rising at the tap of the bell, forming in line
and walking in lock-step. Seemingly it never entered the school-board's
heads that anybody would ever be sent to state's prison. They left the
scholars unprepared for any such career. They have remedied all that in
city schools. Now, when a boy grows up and goes to Sing Sing, he knows
exactly what to do and how to behave. It all comes back to him.

But what I call the finest part of going to school in the country was,
that you didn't go home to dinner. Grandma had a boy only a few years
older than I was, and when I went a-visiting, she fixed us up a "piece."
They call it "luncheon" now, I think--a foolish, hybrid mongrel of a
word, made up of "lump," a piece of bread, and "noon," and "shenk,"
a pouring or drink. But the right name is "piece." What made this
particular "piece" taste so wonderfully good was that it was in a
round-bottomed basket woven of splints dyed blue, and black and red,
and all in such a funny pattern. It was an Indian basket. My grandma's
mother, when she was a little girl, got that from the squaw of old Chief
Wiping-Stick.

The "piece" had bread-and-butter (my grandma used to let me churn
for her sometimes, when I went out there), and some of the slices had
apple-butter on them. (One time she let me stir the cider, when it was
boiling down in the big kettle over the chunk-fire out in the yard. The
smoke got in my eyes.) Sometimes there was honey from the hives over by
the gooseberry bushes--the gooseberries had stickers on them--and we had
slices of cold, fried ham. (I was out at grandpap's one time when they
butchered. They had a chunk-fire then, too, to heat the water to scald
the hogs. And say! Did your grandma ever roast pig's