On Schooling - Page 2

remember Mr. Sandsome chiefly as sitting at his desk, in a little room
full of boys, a humming hive whose air was thick with dust, as the
slanting sunbeams showed. When we were not doing sums or writing copies,
we were always learning or saying lessons. In the early morning Mr.
Sandsome sat erect and bright, his face animated, his ruddy eyes keen
and observant, the cane hanging but uncertainly upon its hook. There was
a standing up of classes, a babble of repetition, now and then a crisis.
How long the days were then! I have heard that scientific
people--Professor C. Darwin is their leader, unless I err--which
probably I do, for names and dates I have hated from my youth up--say
the days grow longer. Anyhow, whoever says it, it is quite wrong. But as
the lank hours of that vast schooltime drawled on, Mr. Sandsome lost
energy, drooped like a flower,--especially if the day was at all
hot,--his sandy hair became dishevelled, justice became nerveless,
hectic, and hasty. Finally came copybooks; and yawns and weird rumblings
from Mr. Sandsome. And so the world aged to the dinner-hour.

When I had been home--it was a day school, for my aunt, who had an
appetite for such things, knew that boarding-schools were sinks of
iniquity--and returned, I had Mr. Sandsome at another phase. He had
dined--for we were simple country folk. The figurative suggestions of
that "phase" are irresistible--the lunar quality. May I say that Mr.
Sandsome was at his full? We now stood up, thirty odd of us altogether,
to read, reading out of books in a soothing monotone, and he sat with
his reading-book before him, ruddy as the setting sun, and slowly,
slowly settling down. But now and then he would jerk back suddenly into
staring wakefulness as though he were fishing--with himself as bait--for
schoolboy crimes in the waters of oblivion--and fancied a nibble. That
was a dangerous time, full of anxiety. At last he went right under and
slept, and the reading grew cheerful, full of quaint glosses and
unexpected gaps, leaping playfully from boy to boy, instead of
travelling round with a proper decorum. But it never ceased, and little
Hurkley's silly little squeak of a voice never broke in upon its mellow
flow. (It took a year for Hurkley's voice to break.) Any such
interruption and Mr. Sandsome woke up and into his next phase
forthwith--a disagreeable phase always, and one we made it our business
to postpone as long as possible.

During that final period, the last quarter, Mr. Sandsome was distinctly
malignant. It was hard to do right; harder still to do wrong. A feverish
energy usually inspired our government. "Let us try to get some work
done," Mr. Sandsome would say--and I have even known him teach things
then. More