"And now for another matter which involves a girl, Eloise Smith. Who is she, you ask? Well, she is neither high born, I fancy, nor city bred; nor much like the girls from Wellesley and Lasell, with whom we used to flirt. She is a country school-ma'am, and is to be graduated this month in the Normal School in Mayville, where you are visiting. What is she to me? Nothing, except this: She has haunted me ever since I heard of her, and I can't get rid of an idea that in some way she is to influence my life. You know I was always given to presentiments and vagaries, and she is the last one. I might not have thought much of her if my uncle were not in a great way on her account. Long ago when they changed the name of the town from Troutburg to Crompton in his honor, he built a school-house on his premises, and gave it to the town. Since then he has felt that he had a right to control it, and say who should teach, and who shouldn't. For a long time the people humored him, and made him school inspector, whose business it was to examine the teachers with regard to their qualifications. With his old time notions, he had some very old-time questions, which with others, he always propounded. As a test of scholarship they were ridiculous; but he was Col. Crompton, and the people shrugged their shoulders and laughed at what they called the Crompton formula. Here are a few of the questions: First, What is logic? Second, Why does the wind usually stop blowing when the sun goes down? I don't know; do you? and we are both Harvarders. The third introduces a man in old Colburn's Arithmetic, driving his sheep or geese to market. The fourth is a scorcher, and has to do with the diameter of a grindstone, after a certain number of inches have been ground from it. Then comes what I call the _pièce de résistance_, but which my uncle called 'killing two birds with one stone.' He has a fad on writing and spelling, and required his victims to put on paper the following: "'Mr. Wright has a right To write the rites of the church.'