A Busy Year at the Old Squires | Page 2

day. I remember
just how the different countries looked and how they were
bounded--though many of these boundaries are now, of course,
considerably changed.
When lessons dragged and dullness settled on the room, Master Joel
was wont to cry, "Halt!" then sit down at the melodeon and play some

school song as lively as the instrument admitted of, and set us all
singing for five or ten minutes, chanting the multiplication tables, the
names of the states, the largest cities of the country, or even the Books
of the Bible. At other times he would throw open the windows and set
us shouting Patrick Henry's speech, or Byron's Apostrophe to the
Ocean. In short, "old Joel" was what now would be called a "live wire."
He was twenty-two then and a student working his own way through
Bates College. After graduating he migrated to a far western state
where he taught for a year or two, became supervisor of schools, then
State Superintendent, and afterwards a Representative to Congress. He
is an aged man now and no word of mine can add much to the honors
which have worthily crowned his life. None the less I want to pay this
tribute to him--even if he did rub my ears at times and cry, "Wake up,
Round-head! Wake up and find out what you are in this world for."
(More rubs!) "You don't seem to know yet. Wake up and find out about
it. We have all come into the world to do something. Wake up and find
out what you are here for!"--and then more rubs!
It wasn't his fault if I never fairly waked up to my vocation--if I really
had one. For the life of me I could never feel sure what I was for!
Cousin Addison seemed to know just what he was going to do, from
earliest boyhood, and went straight to it. Much the same way, cousin
Theodora's warm, generous heart led her directly to that labor of love
which she has so faithfully performed. As for Halstead, he was
perfectly sure, cock-sure, more than twenty times, what he was going to
do in life; but always in the course of a few weeks or months, he
discovered he was on the wrong trail. What can be said of us who either
have no vocation at all, or too many? What are we here for?
In addition to our daily studies at the schoolhouse, we resumed Latin,
in the old sitting-room, evenings, Thomas and Catherine Edwards
coming over across the field to join us. To save her carpet, grandmother
Ruth put down burlap to bear the brunt of our many restless feet--for
there was a great deal of trampling and sometimes outbreaks of
scuffling there.
Thomas and I, who had forgotten much we had learned the previous

winter, were still delving in Æsop's Fables. But Addison, Theodora and
Catherine were going on with the first book of Cæsar's Gallic War.
Ellen, two years younger, was still occupied wholly by her English
studies. Study hours were from seven till ten, with interludes for apples
and pop-corn.
Halstead, who had now definitely abandoned Latin as something which
would never do him any good, took up Comstock's Natural Philosophy,
or made a feint of doing so, in order to have something of his own that
was different from the rest of us. Natural philosophy, he declared, was
far and away more important than Latin.
Memory goes back very fondly to those evenings in the old
sitting-room, they were so illumined by great hopes ahead. Thomas and
I, at a light-stand apart from the others, were usually puzzling out a
Fable--The Lion, The Oxen, The Kid and the Wolf, The Fox and the
Lion, or some one of a dozen others--holding noisy arguments over it
till Master Pierson from the large center table, called out, "Less noise
over there among those Latin infants! Cæsar is building his bridge over
the Rhine. You are disturbing him."
Addison, always very quiet when engrossed in study, scarcely noticed
or looked up, unless perhaps to aid Catherine and Theodora for a
moment, with some hard passage. It was Tom and I who made Latin
noisy, aggravated at times by pranks from Halstead, whose studies in
natural philosophy were by no means diligent. At intervals of assisting
us with our translations of Cæsar and the Fables, Master Pierson
himself was translating the Greek of Demosthenes' Orations, and also
reviewing his Livy--to keep up with his Class at College. But, night or
day, he was always ready to help or advise us, and push us on. "Go
ahead!" was "old Joel's" motto, and "That's what we're here for." He
appeared to be possessed by a profound conviction that the human race
has a great destiny before it,