"While I must assent to what you have said, yet all these advantages are not unmixed blessings. In my experience as a physician, I have seen very many precious lives go out, simply because they could not endure the high pressure system of our modern educators. I feel so strongly upon this subject that I would prefer that a child of mine should live and die absolutely illiterate, than that he should sacrifice one particle of health for any conceivable amount of mere book-learning. I once had an uncle who was a man of wonderful learning. He was a collegian, a master of half a dozen or more languages, and for all this he paid the price of his good health. All his life, he suffered the pangs of an outraged stomach and nervous system. He could never make any use of his splendidly cultivated brain, and was a miserable, unhappy burden to himself and friends to the end of his life. His end was sad, tinged with the element of ridiculousness. He was sitting in a field one day, resting during a short walk, when a great vicious hog attacked him, tossed him about, rooted him here and there, and would have certainly killed him outright if his cries had not brought assistance. He never recovered from the effects of the injuries received on that occasion. Suppose poor old uncle could at that time have traded all his dead and modern languages for a pair of good stout legs, would it not have been a grand bargain for him?" "But could not your uncle have been more judicious and systematic in the prosecution of his studies, and have done the same amount of work without detriment to his health?" asked Professor Gray. "I do not doubt that he might. But our schools are run nowadays upon, as I said before, a high-pressure system. Too many children are packed into imperfectly ventilated schoolrooms, and the poor teachers are miserably overtaxed. But the schools are graded, everything cut and dried, the curriculum made by state or county board; and, like the tyrant's bedstead, those too long must be cut off, and those too short must be stretched. All must fit the bedstead. That great story-teller, Charles Dickens, tells the story exactly in his picture of Dr. Blimmer's system of teaching. That poor babe, Paul Dombey, might as well have been fed to an insatiable ogre as to have been placed in the hands of that pompous idiot. And our country is full of little Paul Dombeys, blossoming for eternity. How much better to have let the poor little fellow play in the sands upon the beach with his sister Florence and old Glubb. But the precocious innocent must be murdered by this same senseless system, because of the inordinate vanity of a foolish father, and the stupidity of his teacher. In vain have I warned hundreds of parents, when I saw their children thus being hurried to premature graves. But they are so proud of the precocious darlings that they seldom heed until it is too late. Faugh! the whole business makes me sick."