My
neighbor over here teaches agriculture, and one of his boys produced
one hundred and fifty bushels of corn on an acre of ground. That's
what I call excellent behavior, and that schoolmaster certainly knows
how to organize the activities of his class. My boy's yield of
thirty-seven bushels, mostly nubbins, does not compare favorably with
the yield of his boy, and I feel that I ought to reform, or else wear
a mask. Here is my boy saying "might of came," and his boy is
raising a hundred and fifty bushels of corn per acre.
If I could only assemble all my boys and girls twenty years hence and
have them give an account of themselves for all the years after they
left school, I could grade them with greater accuracy than I can
possibly do now. Of course, I'd simply grade them on behavior, and
if I could muster up courage, I might ask them to grade mine. I
wonder how I'd feel if I'd find among them such folks as Edison,
Burbank, Goethals, Clara Barton, and Frances Willard. My neighbor
John says the most humiliating experience that a man can have is to
wear a pair of his son's trousers that have been cut down to fit him.
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