The Life of the Fly 



heard of them. What difference did it make 

 to us whether the earth was round or square! 

 In either case, it was just as hard to make it 

 bring forth anything. 



And grammar? The master troubled his 

 head very little about that; and we still less. 

 We should have been greatly surprised by the 

 novelty and the forbidding look of such words 

 in the grammatical jargon as substantive, in- 

 dicative and subjunctive. Accuracy of lan- 

 guage, whether of speech or writing, must be 

 learnt by practice. And none of us was 

 troubled by scruples in this respect. What was 

 the use of all these subtleties, when, on com- 

 ing out of school, a lad simply went back to his 

 flock of sheep ! 



And arithmetic? Yes, we did a little of 

 this, but not under that learned name. We 

 called it sums. To put down rows of figures, 

 not too long, add them and subtract them one 

 from the other was more or less familiar work. 

 On Saturday evenings, to finish up the week, 

 there was a general orgy of sums. The top 

 boy stood up and, in a loud voice, recited the 

 multiplication-table up to twelve times. I 

 say twelve times, for in those days, because of 

 our old duodecimal measures, it was the cus- 

 tom to count as far as the twelve-times table, 



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