Exclude from your classes the cramming system. Prof. Cram is the bane, the evil genius of our classical halls. Supporters of the “forty lines a day” rule, listen! It was our good fortune to learn the classics in a Jesuit college. We were in rhetoric. Our professor gave Monday and Wednesday afternoons to Virgil, Tuesday to Homer, and Friday to Horace. Of Virgil we read book vi., and of Horace the third book of Odes――that is, what we _did_ read of them. The professor was a perfect scholar, an orator, a poet, as inflammable as petroleum, and as sensitive as the “touch-me-not” plant, with a mind the quickest we ever knew, and a heart most affectionate, besides being truly a man of God. Well, the session had entered its fourth month, and we had gone through about three hundred verses of Virgil, while from Horace we were just learning not _magna modis tenuare parvis_. One afternoon the rector suddenly put in an appearance with some of the _patrassi_. As they had taken their seats, the former asked what portions of the Latin classics we had been reading. “Cicero and Livy of the prose, Horace and Virgil of the poets.” “But what part?” quoth he. “Any part,” replied the master. The rector looked puzzled; the boys――well, we do not know, for we had no looking-glass, nor did we look at one another――but perfectly astounded at the coolness of the teacher. One thing, however, all who have survived will remember: the strange feeling that seized us; for “Was he going to make a fool of every one of his boys?” We were eleven in the class. It was a small college, in a provincial town, that has given some very great men to the world, but of which Lord Byron did not sing enthusiastically. There we were: on the pillory, in the stocks, billeted for better for worse, for “what not?” The rector, with ill-disguised impatience, called for one of the boys, and, opening Virgil at random, chanced on the very death of Turnus. The poor boy, pale and trembling, began to read, and on he went, while the relentless questioner seemed carried away by the beauty of the passage, unconscious of the torture to which he had doomed the unlucky pupil. But, no; we take the word back: because as he was advancing he seemed to become more self-possessed, and so much so that at the end he described the last victim of the Lavinian struggle with uncommon pathos, until, with a hoarse sound of his voice, he launched the soul of the upstart _sub umbras_, just as the teacher would himself have read to us a parallel passage. It was evident that, although he had never before read those lines, he had caught their spirit, and the recitation ended perfectly. Then, as he was requested to render the whole passage into vernacular, with a fluent diction, choice words, and not once faltering, he acquitted himself with universal applause. One or two more boys were called up, and the visitors took their leave much pleased.