Before the doctor lay one thin book. It turned out to be a spelling book. The doctor opened it, glared on me leisurely, and finally said: “Spell cat.” I did so. “Spell hat.” I spelled. “Rat,” said the doctor, with a look of explosive fierceness and in a tone an octave higher. I spelled, and then remarked: “But, doctor, you surely must know that I can spell words of one syllable?” “I don’t,” he shouted, and propounded “mat” for me to spell, with an increase of energy in his voice, and so went on until I had so spelled long enough to amuse him and the other two trustee triflers. Then he shut the book, saying: “Young man, you’ll do for our camp. I wouldn’t teach that school for $5,000 a year; and there are two boys you’ll have for scholars that I advise you to kill, if possible, the first week. Let’s all go over and take a drink.” My school house was the church, built and paid for partly by the gamblers and partly by the good people of Jimtown “for the use of all sects” on Sundays, and for educational purposes on week days. I was shut up in that little church six hours a day with sixty children and youths, ranging from four to eighteen years of age. In summer it was a fiercely hot little church. The mercury was always near 90 by noon, and sometimes over 100, and you could at times hear the shingles split and crack on the roof of the cathedral. A few years of interior California summers’ suns will turn unpainted boards and shingles almost as black as charcoal. The majority of my pupils’ parents being from New England and North America, they brought and carried into effect all their North American ideas of education. The California summer heat is, I think, unfit for educational purposes. It is too hot to herd sixty restless children together six hours a day. They proved this in several cases. Some fell sick suddenly. Some fainted. But this made no difference. The school went on in all its misery. I sent a fainting child home one day, and the father returned with it an hour afterward. He was fierce, and said he wanted his child kept in school when he sent it to school. This was in California’s early days. My scholars were the children of the Argonauts, and in some cases had come out with them. There was then no regular system of text-books. Publishers had not commenced making fortunes by getting out a new school-book system every three years.