My successor, poor fellow, did not get off as easily as I did. He corrected the son of another gentleman from the South. The gentleman called at the school-house the next day, asked him to the door and cracked his skull with the butt of his revolver. The risks then of imparting knowledge to the young were great. School teaching now in the mines is, I imagine, a tame affair compared with that past, so full of golden dreams and leaden realities. If I could have taken that portion of my scholars who were beyond the A, B, C business to a shady grove of live oaks near by and talked to them for an hour or two a day, devoting each day to some special subject, at the same time encouraging questions from them, I believe I could have woke up more that was sleeping in their minds in a week than I did in a month by the cut-and-dried system I was obliged to follow. I would have taken them out of sight of the school-house, the desks and all thereunto appertaining, which to most children suggests a species of imprisonment. I think that amount of time and effort is enough in one day for both teacher and pupil. It would not be trifling work if one’s heart was in it, short as the time employed may seem, because a teacher must teach himself to teach. Knowing a thing is not always being able to make it plain to others. The gifted dunderhead who tried to teach me to play whist commenced by saying: “Now that’s a heart, and hearts is trumps, you know,” and went on with the game, deeming he had made things clear enough for anybody. Would not one topic to talk about be enough for one day? Take the motive power of steam the first day, the cause of rain the second, the flight of birds and their structure for flying the third, the making of soil and its removal from mountain to plain the fourth, a talk on coal or some other kind of mining the fifth, and so on. Would not subjects continually suggest themselves to the interested teacher? And if you do get one idea or suggestion per day in the scholar’s mind, is not that a good day’s work? How many of us wise, grown-up people can retire at night saying, “I have learned a new thing to-day?” But I am theorizing. I have placed myself in the ranks of those disagreeable, meddlesome people who are never satisfied with present methods. So I will say that I do not imagine that my suggestions will revolutionize our educational system, based rather heavily on the idea that youth is the time, and the only time, to learn everything, and also to learn a great many things at a time. In after years, when we settle down to our work, we try, as a rule, to learn but one thing at a time. How would a man stagger along if it was required of him five days out of seven to learn a bit of painting, then of horseshoeing, then of printing, and top off with a slice of elocution? It seems to me like an overcrowding of the upper intellectual story. CHAPTER XIX. “JIMTOWN.”