The course of instruction pursued at our school included reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and the classics. In the general branches all sorts, sizes, and sexes, stood up together in the same classes, according to their relative state of advancement. The Greek and Latin classes only were select, they being composed of some half-dozen boys of superior station destined to go to college when they had mastered Latin enough to enable them to spell through Cæsar and Virgil. With these the master took considerable pains for his own credit’s sake; for it would have been an eternal disgrace to him had his pupils been rejected on their first easy examination at Aberdeen. In the other branches the method pursued was one entirely of routine. Nothing was explained in a rational or intelligible way. The only reading books in the school were the Bible and McCulloch’s first, second, and third _Courses of Reading_, three progressive volumes of badly selected extracts from various authors; and at these we hammered away day after day, and over and over again, from the moment we entered the school until the moment we left it. There was not a single History in the school—not even a History of England in its most modest form of abridgment. As for myself, my early knowledge of English history was entirely derived from a sheet of coloured portraits of the English kings pasted up on the wall of my box-bed at home. My knowledge of the dates of their reigns, and the order of their succession, is even now vividly associated with that coloured sheet. Geography was taught from a book. We learned boundaries and the names of countries by heart, and chattered them like parrots; but of the characteristics of countries and their inhabitants we learned nothing beyond that such and such a people “were a hardy race, who devoted themselves to agriculture,” and the like. Arithmetic was taught in the same way. When we had, by an entirely mechanical and illogical process, committed to memory the multiplication table, we were given over to somebody’s “Arithmetic,” to puzzle over rules and make our answers to the questions tally, by any means whatever, with those in the book. I remember, with regard to the rule of three, that we used to try one position after the other, until we worked out the right answer. The dominie never condescended to explain the simple logic of the process. The result is, as regards myself, that I am to this day the greatest dunce at figures in the world. I believe I have been detected refusing to purchase oranges at two for three halfpence, but readily agreeing to take five for sixpence, with the idea that it was a better bargain.