A TEACHER: A STUDENT OF LAW, AND TUTOR. 51 



accomplished gentleman ; we respected him as a man of 

 great sense and quick apprehension, and we exceedingly 

 loved him as a teacher devotedly kind and faithful. Hav 

 ing scarcely passed his boyhood when he entered college, 

 he could not be supposed to have thoroughly mastered the 

 whole course ; and having never reviewed, as I suppose, in 

 his mature years, he probably as indeed some of us sup 

 posed at the time was the case was obliged to devote 

 almost as much time and labor to his preparation for the 

 recitation room as his pupils themselves; but I do not 

 remember that we ever found him wanting, or caught him 

 stumbling, though my old friend Aaron Button sometimes 

 said, " Benny blushed as he was trying to help floun 

 dering, in the mire of a problem which he was unprepared 

 to solve." 



But the course of college learning at that time, do you 

 know how meagre it was ? As though we had come fresh 

 from the common school, we were put back into our gram 

 mar, geography, and the common learning, and kept in them 

 a great part of the first two years, so that at their close we 

 had scarcely advanced farther than is now requisite for ad 

 mission. And then what poor barren things our grammars, 

 lexicons, and text-books then were, compared with such as 

 'are now furnished ! And our teachers were as scantily fur 

 nished as our books, with stores of knowledge that are now 

 prepared for the acquisition of the earnestly studious mind. 

 I wonder that any of us came out men, or ever became 

 such. And yet we were fully employed, and on such things 

 as were put into our hands we were kept hard at work. 

 Though we were perhaps half a year on Morse's two huge 

 volumes of geography, we were required to recite the 

 whole of them, and our memories, if no other faculties, were 

 severely tasked. We were required to review our studies 

 again and again, and to be very exact in our recitations. 

 Every "mistake was marked, and the account, we were told, 

 was preserved. And it may be less important, in the pro- 



