After all I was known to be a poor schoolmaster, and suspected—as I now think, justly, of being a pedant. It would be both sad and comical, if I were to record my experiences as a teacher; the plans I dreamed over; the schedules I copied on large paper; the attempts to make the big boys talk Latin; the experiments in physics which burst my retorts and burnt my fingers; the amazement of parents and the fun of children. I verily believe there was not a more chimerical or less useful teacher, south of Mason’s and Dixon’s line. Lessons went to leeward, while I was drifting away after a project of a new Latin Grammar. The primers were made into boats and cocked-hats, while I invented a new orthography; and my best coat was sewed over with bits of red flannel, while I draughted a lecture on Female Education. Donald Gordon courted Judith Brewster, during the very period in which I was bringing her to the point of conjugating _amo_, _amare_, _amari_. Early hours and hard reading, kept me still advancing in a sort of miscellaneous and preposterous condition. I began a hundred pursuits, with the _furore_ of a crusader. I gathered flowers for an herbarium, and pasted wrong names on the species for want of a master. I made maps of the stars, and pointed them out to Judith, as we walked on the top of the house. My only Italian book was an odd volume of Dante, which broke me down after getting half way up the circling Babel of the Purgatory. My version of the Bucolics shamed me beyond expression, on comparison with Dryden. In riding about the country, I fell in with planters and county-court lawyers, and doctors, who had little Latin and less Greek, but who nevertheless foiled me in argument. They knew how to talk of crops, of “good seasons for stripping tobacco,” of the weather being giv-y, of long and short staple in cotton, of horizontal ploughing, and of prices at Liverpool; while they could also connect with these questions the political economy of our great products, the effects of the British policy on our carrying-trade, and the theory of state-sovereignty as discussed in Congress. All these things were beyond my ken. That “reading” which “makes a full man” made me often seem a very foolish one. I made blunders in history, and was innocently unacquainted with several dates, such as George Mason’s letters and the Battle of the Cow-Pens. I could have said much about Aegos-Potamos, or the Thirty Tyrants; but my old-time studies were very rapidly turning me into a mummy. I dictate these confessions, _in perpetuam rei memoriam_, to guard solitary and too-forward boys from going too freely before the gales of their literary propensities. Nevertheless, for individual delight, everlasting novelty and sweet recollections, I still hold my way to have been best of any. CHAPTER X.