“At the last Christmas exhibition, the first act of Plautus’s ‘Captives’ was performed in Latin. For this I painted a street scene, which took me several days. I believe I never worked harder than when preparing for this exhibition. The boys were brought to such a pitch of excellence in mental arithmetic, and their other exercises, that we were obliged to give them a great deal of practice that they might not recede. Besides this I gave a great many lessons from home, attended to a class who were drawing maps and plans; and at the same time painted the scenes. “During more than three weeks, including even Sundays, I was hard at work on an average at least eighteen hours to each day; sometimes much more. This I could have borne without injury, but I had almost all the care and responsibility of the school on my hands at the same time; for my brother Matthew was in London several weeks just before the holidays, and my father was unwell. I am not yet recovered from the ill effects upon my health of the exertions I then made; but, however, that exhibition raised our school very high in the public estimation. The mental arithmetic astonished very much, and as we invited questions from the audience, they could not suppose that the boys had been practised in the questions which I asked them.” To what a pitch of excellence he raised his classes is shown by the following record:— “About the same time there arrived in England an American lad named Zerah Colbourn, whose power in mental arithmetic was made the subject of public exhibition. As this was a department in which I had diligently exercised both myself and my pupils, I accompanied my father to the performance with great interest. We found that the boy’s power consisted chiefly in finding with great rapidity the factors of numbers, and square and cube roots. I naturally tried my ability against his, and I found that so long as low numbers were dealt with, I equalled and even surpassed him in rapidity, but that he could deal effectually with numbers so high as to be far beyond my management. Thus he would rapidly extract the cube root of a number expressed in nine figures, provided always it were an exact cube, for with other numbers he declined to deal. His mode of proceeding was a secret, which, with some other devices, his father declared himself willing to reveal so soon as a subscription of, I think, one thousand pounds or guineas should have been raised. As this did not seem to me a very hopeful project, I came to the conclusion that my only way of becoming acquainted with the secret was to find it out for myself. I accordingly went to work, and soon discovered a mode of performing myself that which I had witnessed with so much wonder; and not content with this, proceeded to consider