AGRICULTURAL AND ECONOMIC CONDITIONS 99 



Academy. When I was twenty-one I was em- 

 ployed, on the reputation of my brothers as good 

 teachers, to teach the winter school at the small 

 village of Beerytown, which with the surrounding 

 countryside, furnished about eighty pupils of school 

 age. The school proved to be well-advanced not 

 only in books but in deviltry and had a large per 

 cent of nearly-grown boys who had made it warm 

 for my predecessor, got him into a law suit and 

 finally succeeded in getting him dismissed. Later 

 I made the acquaintance of this gentleman who 

 became a well-known scholar and who, for many 

 years, was Secretary of State for New York. 



I did not have very much difficulty in governing 

 the school but the larger boys and girls kept me 

 screwed up to concert pitch all the time. One 

 young lady kept me hard at work preparing the 

 lessons in Watson's Mental Arithmetic an old 

 textbook which was, in fact, a mental algebra. A 

 laughable little thing happened in this wise : The 

 boys were requested to bring in some wood on 

 their return from recess. They obeyed quite 

 literally. Every boy loaded his arms to his nose 

 and, marching in Indian file, they deposited such a 

 quantity of stove wood as had never been seen in 

 the school-house at one time. One small boy, after 



