I could never learn the multiplication table. There are things which the mind, like the stomach, spasmodically rejects without the least perceptible cause or reason. So I have found it to be with certain words which _will_ not be remembered. There was one Arab word which I verily believe I looked out one hundred times in the dictionary, and repeated a thousand, yet never could keep it. Every teacher should be keen to detect these antipathies, and cure them by gentle and persuasive means. Unfortunately no one in my youth knew any better way to overcome them than by "keeping me in" after school to study, when I was utterly weary and worn--a very foolish punishment, as is depriving a boy of his meals, or anything else levelled at Nature. I think there must have been many months of time, and of as much vain and desperate effort on my part to remember, wasted on my early arithmetic. Now I can see that by _rewards_ or inducements, and by the very simple process of only learning "one time one is one" for the first lesson, and that and one line more for the second, I could have mastered the whole book in time. But oh! the weary, dreary days, and the sad waste of time, and the anxious nervous suffering, which arithmetic cost me in my youth, and mathematics in after years! But there was one class at Jacob's in which I was _facile-princeps_ and habitual past-grand-master. This was the class which was, like the professorship of Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, for Matters and Things in General. That is to say, we read aloud from some book--it may have been selections from English writers--and then Jacob, picking out the hard words or facts or phrases, required of them definition or explanation. One day there arose in these questions a sum in arithmetic, when I shot down to the tail of the class as a plummet drops to the bottom of the well. I shall never forget the proud fierce impatience which I felt, like an imprisoned chieftain who knows that he will speedily be delivered and take dire vengeance on his foes. I had not long to wait. "'Refectory,' what is a 'refectory'? Hillburn Jones, does thee know? Joseph Widdifield, does thee?" But none of them knew till it came to me "down tail," when I cried "An oyster-cellar." "That is quite right, Charley; thee can go up head," said Jacob, and as I passed Hillburn Jones he whispered, half in fun, half enviously, the "Kemble Refectory." This was an oyster-cellar which had been recently opened under the Arch Street Theatre, and whence Hillburn and I had derived our knowledge of the word, the difference being that I remembered more promptly and risked more boldly. But I missed it one day when I defined a _peasant_ as "a nest full of young birds;" the fact being that I recalled a picture in AEsop's fables, and confused _peasant_ with _pheasant_. One day Jacob rebuked the class for letting me always be at their head, when Hillburn Jones, who was a very honest little boy, said, "Indeed, Jacob, thee must know