But, really, grammar made me more trouble than any other study. Somehow I never could learn grammar, and it always made me angry when I tried. My parents and teachers told me that I could never write or speak unless I learned grammar, and so I tried and tried, but even now I can hardly tell an adverb from an adjective, and I do not know that I care. When a little boy, I used to think that if I really had anything to tell I could make myself understood; and I think so still. The longer I live the surer I am that the chief difficulty of writers and speakers is the lack of interesting thoughts, and not of proper words. Certainly grammar was a hideous nightmare to me when a child at school. Of all the parts of speech the verb was the most impossible to get. I remember now how difficult it was to conjugate the verb “to love,” which the books seemed always to put first. How I stumbled and blundered as I tried to learn that verb! I might possibly have mastered the present tense, but when it came to all the different moods and various tenses it became a hopeless task. I am much older now, but somehow that verb has never grown easier with the fleeting years. The past-perfect tense has always been well-nigh impossible to learn. I never could tell when it left off, or whether it ever left off or not. Neither have I been able to keep it separate from the present, or, for that matter, from the future. A few years after the district school, I went for a brief time to the Academy on the hill, where I studied Latin; and I remember that this same verb was there, with all the old complications and many that were new, to greet me when I came. To be sure, it had been changed to “Amo, Amas, Amat,” but it was the old verb just the same, and its various moods and tenses caused me the same trouble that I had experienced as a little child. My worry over this word has made me wonder whether this verb, in all its moods and tenses, was not one of the many causes of the downfall of the Roman Republic, of which we used to hear so much. At any rate, I long since ceased trying to get it straight or keep it straight; indeed, I am quite sure that it was designed only to tangle and ensnare. CHAPTER VI THE SCHOOL READERS If we scholars did not grow up to be exemplary men and women, it surely was not the fault of our teachers or our parents,—or of the schoolbook publishers. When I look back to those lessons that we learned, I marvel that I ever wandered from the straight path in the smallest possible degree. Whether we were learning to read or write, studying grammar or composition, in whatever book we chanced to take, there was the moral precept plain on every page. Our many transgressions could have come only from the fact that we really did not know what these lessons meant; and doubtless our teachers also never thought they had any sort of relation to our lives.