James Nichols was a devout believer in Solomon's maxim that to spare the rod is to spoil the child. The whip was his arbiter in all differences which arose between his pupils and himself. He never paused, as Mr. Montieth has lately done, to consider that at least two-thirds of the offences for which children are flogged at school are "crimes for which they are in nowise responsible," and "when stripped of the color given to them by senseless and unmeaning rules, they are simply the crimes of being a boy and being a girl," and are "incited by bad air, cold feet, overwork and long confinement; crimes which the parents of these same children are accustomed to excuse in themselves, when they sit in church, by the dulness of the sermon, or other circumstances that offend against nature and which they sometimes soothe with fennel or hartshorn, or change of position, and not unseldom with sleep." In school discipline Mr. Nichols was a pure materialist. He never realized Cayley's profound lesson that "education is not the mere storing a youthful memory with a bundle of facts which it neither digests nor assimilates," but that it is the formation and training of a mind. Under his _regime_ the rod ruled everything. Even the offence of whispering was punished by the lash. Upon one occasion, when young Willard was seated between two brothers--Henry and Brayton Abbott by name--engaged in solving Algebraic problems, a whispered inquiry, regarding the lesson, passed from one to the other. Mr. Nichols at the moment happened to glance towards them, and conjectured, by the movement of Willard's lips, that he was violating the rule against whispering. "Willard Glazier!" said he, angrily, "come out here, sir!" The boy obeyed. "Now then, Willard," said Mr. Nichols, "I presume you understand the rules of this school?" "I think I do, sir." "Very well, then you know that whispering during the hours of study is a breach of its discipline, and that I must punish you." Willard said nothing. "Have you a knife, sir?" pursued the teacher. "No, sir," replied the boy, not quite certain whether the knife was wanted for the purpose of scalping him, or merely with a view of amputating the unruly member which had been the instrument of offence. "Well, take this one," said Nichols, handing him a five-bladed pocket-knife, with the large blade open, "go out and cut me a good stout stick." The boy by no means relished the prospect this mission suggested, but seeing no means of escape, he went to a grove in the neighborhood and cut a stick whose dimensions resembled a young tree--shrewdly suspecting that Nichols would never venture to use a club of such size. With this stick he stalked majestically back to the school-room. As he entered, he saw Henry Abbott standing up in front of the teacher's desk, and heard him utter these words: