Last year, in a quiet hamlet in Pennsylvania, an old man died. For more than sixty years he had been a teacher. He had taught in nearly every district of the county where his long and useful life was spent, and half the men of that county, under sixty years of age, have been his pupils. More fully than any other person I have ever known, he was my ideal of what a school master should be—the controlling spirit of a school; its master literally, as well as in name; a firm, strong, just man, encouraging the diffident, punishing the vicious, and inspiring all. Fully six feet in stature, angular, with immense reach of arms, large hands, a noble height and breadth of forehead, and steel-gray eyes sparkling under bristling eye-brows, the heaviest that ever adorned a human face—he was, in the school-room, a formidable figure. Even the later-day “hoodlum,” with his reckless impudence, would have regarded him with awe. He was a strict disciplinarian. He had no mawkish sentimentality about corporal punishment. He delighted, I think, to deal with a vicious, disobedient boy—one of the half-animal and wholly perverse kind, as full of cruelty and meanness as an egg is of meat. When one of this class was enrolled among his pupils, it was wonderful how soon all the perversity of his nature was reduced to subjection. Yet this old master was not a school-room tyrant. The well-disposed among his pupils held him in affectionate regard, and even the turbulent respected the justice of his decisions and the firmness and sincerity of his rule. He did not take pleasure in inflicting pain. He “trounced” a bad or unruly boy because he regarded trouncing as a necessary and wholesome discipline, which would make him a better man and a better citizen. And the punishments he inflicted were rarely, if ever, undeserved. He was as just as he was stern. As an instructor, he had mastered the branches he taught. He rarely held a book in his hand while hearing a class. With the range of text-books then in use, he was thoroughly familiar. Every rule or principle or fact they contained was at his tongue’s end. He had a real love for his work, and an affectionate interest in the progress of his pupils. The old, weather-beaten brick school house on the “Commons,” with its rude pine desks and benches, whittled by the jack-knives of more than one generation of boys, and its painted black-board on the wall, was the soul of his earthly interests and ambition.