Missouri Country Life Conference. 223 



The ideal school — that is, the social center where the mas- 

 ter makes it his home, with a little farm in connection — is where 

 the people have their meetings, and the school is held twelve 

 months in the year. I do not mean that the children attend 

 school five or six days a week for the twelve months, but attend 

 school five days for a part of the year, then during the summer 

 season, while their experimental work is being done, go back 

 to the school at least once each week or two to review the work 

 and look after such things as may need attention. Thus they 

 are taught how to perform the duties that they will be called on 

 after a while to do. Why, I remember one of the problems in 

 algebra. It was about a man on horseback and a man on foot, 

 and a goose. The goose started out along the road traveling, 

 of course, at a slow rate. A while after that the man started on 

 foot. After he had been gone for a while another man started on 

 horseback, going a little faster, and they wanted to know of me, 

 after they had been going a certain length of time, that is, after 

 the goose had been traveling a certain length of time, how far it 

 had gone when the first man overtook it and when the second 

 man overtook it, and how far the first man had gone when the 

 second man overtook him. Well, I expect you could not work 

 that, could you? I could not, either. I did not want to try very 

 much because I believed it all a lie, anyhow. After I had 

 graduated from the rural school I knew a good many things — 

 I thought I did — but I did not know how to feed a calf. I did 

 not know how to feed a boy or a girl a balanced ration. Yet 

 feeding calves and people was to be part of my life work, yet 

 my school had absolutely failed to equip me for that greatest 

 of all things, making a living. 



Now then, our work in the country and your work and mine 

 will be measured by the service that we can render. It has 

 been my privilege to visit a great many historical places of this 

 country within the last few years, and while I don't like very 

 much to go to the grave, yet I sometimes make the trip, espe- 

 cially when I can visit a cemetery where great men have been 

 buried, possibly a few hundred years. In some of those burial 

 grounds the marble slabs and the granite ones that were erected 

 have lost their lettering, it being erased by the ravages of time, 

 and on some of them hands that have remembered have im- 

 bedded the bronze slabs and tablets in them, reciting the in- 

 scription that the marble and granite ones bore. I find in every 

 case where such have been remembered they have been remem- 



