ioo AUTOBIOGRAPHY 



unloading, tarried to see the others come in; as a 

 big boy passed him he tripped and the big boy and 

 the load of wood both went sprawling to the floor. 

 Before the uproar had ceased I had the little fel- 

 low by the shoulders of his round-a-bout coat and, 

 with one upward surge, the coat was in my hands 

 and his pants on the floor. " My scat ! " that was 

 a scene for an artist ! For the boy had no shirt 

 or perhaps it was inside the coat I did not stop 

 to investigate but with a face as red as those of 

 the larger girls, I crushed him to the floor, gath- 

 ered him and the wreckage in my arms, thrust them 

 together into the basket room, and sent his brother 

 in after him. Soon afterward he appeared, 

 clothed, and I lived for several days in nervous 

 dread of hearing from this ridiculous episode, but 

 nothing happened. 



In those days the first thing the older pupils tried 

 to do was to " stick " the teacher. The following 

 will show a few of the ways in which they tried to 

 " stick " me. A boy more than twenty years old 

 called me to his seat and expressed a great desire 

 to master all there was in Thompson's Higher 

 Arithmetic and wished to begin on the first page in 

 Roman notation and to follow with every succeed- 

 ing process. I helped him through addition and 



