The school-houses where the youth were taught were in keeping with the extent of instruction received within them. They were invariably small, with low ceilings, badly lighted, and without ventilation. The floor was of rough pine boards laid loose, with cracks between them that were a standing menace to jackknives and slate pencils. [Footnote: Atlantic Monthly.] The seats and desks were of the same material, roughly planed and rudely put together. The seats were arranged around the room on three sides, without any support for the back, and all the scholars sat facing each other, the girls on one side and the boys on the other. The seats across the end were debatable ground between the two, but finally came to be monopolized by the larger boys and girls who, by some strange law of attraction, gravitated together. Between was an open space in which the stove stood, and when classes were drawn up to recite, the teacher's desk stood at the end facing the door, and so enabled the teacher to take in the school at a glance. But the order maintained was often very bad. In fact it would be safe to say the greatest disorder generally prevailed. The noise of recitations, and the buzz and drone of the scholars at their lessons, was sometimes intolerable, and one might as well try to study in the noisy caw-caw of a rookery. Occasionally strange performances were enacted in those country school-rooms. I remember a little boy between seven and eight years old getting a severe caning for misspelling a simple word of two syllables, and as I happened to be the little boy I have some reason to recollect the circumstance. The mistake certainly did not merit the castigation, the marks of which I carried on my back for many days, and it led to a revolt in the school which terminated disastrously to the teacher. Two strong young men attending the school remonstrated with the master, who was an irascible Englishman, during the progress of my punishment, and they were given to understand that if they did not hold their peace they would get a taste of the same, whereupon they immediately collared the teacher. After a brief tussle around the room, during which some of the benches were overturned, the pedagogue was thrown on the floor, and then one took him by the nape of the neck, and the other by the heels, and he was thrown out of doors in the snow. There were no more lessons heard that day. On the next an investigation followed, when the teacher was dismissed, and those guilty of the act of insubordination were admonished.