My eldest brother, and two of my brother Mark's children, at about this time crossed the same bright river and rested under the shade of the celestial trees. Myself and wife had intended to live in G----, but as her father was gone, and as she had formed a strong mutual attachment for my family, my wife the following summer took much pleasure in building a handsome cottage nearly opposite my father's house, and on a beautiful lot of land given us by my brother. We formed a literary and musical club, which met weekly at our house, making it the social centre of the entire town. I was elected chairman of the school committee, and proceeded vigorously in a crusade against ignorance; but soon found that the life of a reformer is crowned with more thorns than roses, a thousandfold! I removed incompetent teachers who, by their silly question and answer methods, were producing parrots--not scholars. On one occasion, when I substituted a trained normal school graduate for a useless dancing doll who had made herself popular by flattering parents and coddling their children, all pupils were withdrawn from the school. I told the new teacher to ring the bell, take in sewing if she wished, and draw her salary even if she was left alone in her glory; then I notified the parents that unless they at once sent their children to the school, I should have the pupils arrested for truancy, and themselves fined for violating the laws of the state. Moral suasion had failed; but the strong arm of the law prevailed, and they soon acknowledged that the new instruction was the best they had ever had in the district. Much time had hitherto been worse than wasted by cramming the minds with the jaw-breaking names of unimportant rivers, mountains, descriptions of all the frog ponds in Ethiopia, and other useless trash in the so-called geographies; in memorizing the obsolete rules of duodecimals, compound proportion, etc., in the arithmetic; long-winded, unpractical rules for grammar, etc. I issued a circular eliminating this trash from the course of study, substituting the practical short cuts of modern business principles, and in this, also, I met with opposition from the "moss-backs," who insisted that what they had learned in the year one was good enough for their children; they wanted no "new-fangled" notions. They reminded me of the way-back-hard-shell preacher whose hymn book had been stuffed with profane poems by some lewd fellows of the baser sort. He always opened at random and, trusting to divine guidance, read the first hymn that presented itself; he commenced: "We will sing together the one thousand three hundred and forty 'leventh hime." "'All around the cobbler's bench the monkey chased the weasel--'"