here were the four
apples in a row, and the two apples, and you that had worried over
meadows so long and so wide, and men mowing them in so many days and
a half, had to think how many apples Ann really did have. Some of the
fellows with forked hairs on their chins and uncertain voices--the big
fellows in the back seats, where the apple-cores and the spit-balls come
from knew every example in the book by heart.

And there is yet another reason why the country school has brought forth
men of whom we do well to be proud. At the county-seat, every so often,
the school commissioners held an examination. Thither resorted many, for
the most part anxious to determine if they really knew as much as they
thought they did. If you took that examination and got a "stiff kit"
for eighteen months, you had good cause to hold your head up and step
as high as a blind horse. A "stiff kit" for eighteen months is no small
thing, let me tell you. I don't know if there is anything corresponding
to a doctor's hood for such as win a certificate to teach school for
two years hand-running; but there ought to be. A fellow ought not to
be obliged to resort to such tactics as taking out a folded paper and
perusing it in the hope that some one will ask him: "What you got there,
Calvin?" so as to give you a chance to say, carelessly, "Oh, jist a
'stiff-kit' for two years."

(When you get as far along as that, you simply have to take a term in
the junior Prep. Department at college, not because there is anything
left for you to learn, but for the sake of putting a gloss on your
education, finishing it off neatly.)

And then if you were going to read law with Mr. Parker, or study
medicine with old Doc. Harbaugh, and you kind of run out of clothes, you
took that certificate and hunted up a school and taught it. Sometimes
they paid you as high as $20 a month and board, lots of board, real
buckwheat cakes ("riz" buckwheat, not the prepared kind), and real maple
syrup, and real sausage, the kind that has sage in it; the kind that you
can't coax your butcher to sell you. The pale, tasteless stuff he gives
you for sausage I wouldn't throw out to the chickens. Twenty dollars a
month and board! That's $4 a month more than a hired man gets.

But it wasn't alone the demonstration that, strange as it might seem,
it was possible for a man to get his living by his wits (though that
has done much to produce great men) as it was the actual exercise of
teaching. R