that spot opposite where Wall
Street slants away from Broadway, and my feet trod on ground worth, in
the market, more than the twenty-dollar gold pieces that would cover
it. My eye lighted upon a flaking brownstone slab, that told me Captain
Michael Cresap rested there. Captain Michael Cresap! The intervening
years all fled away before me, and once again my boyish heart thrilled
with that incomparable oration in McGuffey's Reader, "Who is there
to mourn for Logan? Not one." Captain Cresap was the man that led the
massacre of Logan's family.

And there was more than good literature in those Readers. There was one
piece that told about a little boy alone upon a country road at
night. The black trees groaned and waved their skinny arms at him.
The wind-torn clouds fitfully let a pale and watery moonlight stream
a little through. It was very lonely. Over his shoulder the boy saw
indistinct shapes that followed after, and hid themselves whenever he
looked squarely at them. Then, suddenly, he saw before him in the gloom,
a gaunt white specter waiting for him--waiting to get him, its arms
spread wide out in menace. He was of our breed, though, this boy. He did
not turn and run. With God knows what terror knocking at his ribs, he
trudged ahead to meet his fate, and lo! the grisly specter proved to be
a friendly guide-post to show the way that he should walk in. Brother
(for you are my kin that went with me to public school), in the life
that you have lived since you first read the story of Harry and the
Guide-post, has it been an idle tale, or have you, too, found that what
we dreaded most, what seemed to us so terrible in the future has, after
all, been a friendly guide-post, showing us the way that we should walk
in?

McGuffey had a Speller, too. It began with simple words in common use,
like a-b ab, and e-b eb, and i-b, ib, proceeding by gradual, if not by
easy stages to honorificatudinibility and disproportionableness, with
a department at the back devoted to twisters like phthisic, and
mullein-stalk, and diphtheria, and gneiss. We used to have a fine old
sport on Friday afternoons, called "choose-up-and-spell-down." I don't
know if you ever played it. It was a survival, pure and simple, from the
Old Red School-house. There was where it really lived. There was
where it flourished as a gladiatorial spectacle. The crack spellers of
District Number 34 would challenge the crack spellers of the Sinking
Spring School. The whole