And all those examples that I learned to cipher out! I am sure I know more to-day than the flaxen-haired barefoot boy who used to sit at his little desk at school and only drop his nibbled slate-pencil to drive the flies away from his long bare legs, but I could not do those sums to-day even if one of my old-time teachers should come back from her long-forgotten grave and threaten to keep me in for the rest of my life unless I got the answer right. And then the geography! How hard they tried to make us learn this book, and how many recesses were denied us because we were not sure just which river in Siberia was the longest! Of course we knew nothing about Siberia, or whether the rivers ran water or blood; but we were forced to know which was the largest and just how long it was. And so all over the great round world we travelled, to find cities, towns, rivers, mountain ranges, peninsulas, oceans, and bays. How important it all was! I remember that one of the ways they took to make us learn this book was to have us sing geography in a chorus of little voices. I can recall to-day how one of those old tunes began, but I remember little beyond the start. The song was about the capitals of all the States, and it began, “State of Maine, Augusta, is on the Kennebec River,” and so on through the whole thirty-three or four, or whatever the number was when I was a little child. Well, many, many years have passed away since then, and I have wandered far and wide from my old-time country home. There are few places in the United States that I have not seen, in my quest for activity and change. I have even stood on some of the highest peaks of the Alps, and looked down upon its quiet valleys and its lovely lakes; but I have never yet been to Augusta on the Kennebec River in the State of Maine, and it begins to look as if I never should. Still, if Fortune ever takes me there, I shall be very glad that I learned when yet a child at school that Augusta was the capital of Maine and on the Kennebec River. So, too, I have never been to Siberia, and, not being a Russian, I presume that I shall never go. And in fact, wherever I have wandered on the earth I have had to learn my geography all over new again.