The old time pedagogue is a thing of the past--_pars temporis acti_ is the Latin of it, may be, but I'm not sure--I'm rusty in the Latin now. When I quit school I could read it a good deal. But of the pedagogue. The twenty years since he ceased to flourish seem, on reflection, like an age--an _æon_, as the Greeks would say. I never did know much Greek. I got most of my education from pedagogues of the old sort. They kept pouring it on to me till it soaked in. That's the way I got it. I have had corns and bunions on my back for not being sufficiently porous to absorb the multiplication table rapidly enough to suit the whim of one of those learned tyrants. But the pedagogue became extinct and passed into the fossil state some twenty years ago, when free schools took good hold. He scampered away when he heard the whistle of the steam engine along iron highways and the cry of small boys on the streets of the towns hawking the daily papers. He could live nowhere within the pale of innovation. He was born an exemplar of rigidity. The very name of reform was hateful to him. We older fellows remember him well, but to the younger fry he is not even a fossil, he is a myth. Of course pedagogues differed slightly in the matter of particular disposition and real character, but in a _general way_ they had a close family resemblance. I purpose to write of one Blodgett--T. Blodgett, as it was written in the fly-leaf of Webster's Elementary--and he was an extraordinary specimen of the genus pedagogue. But before I introduce him, let me, by way of preface and prelude, give you a view of the salients of the history of the days when pole-ribbed school houses--log cabin school houses--flourished, with each a pedagogue for supreme, "unquestioned and unquestionable" despot.