WHEN THE COMMITTEE MEN CAME
The second new book that was purchased in honor of the First Room was
a history of the United States. This was quite a grown-up history
with its three hundred pages besides the Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution. There were maps and pictures. There were even
detailed maps of many battles. There were “chronological reviews,”
which consisted of long lists of dates, each with its proper event
attached. They were recited at express train speed as follows:
1607. Jamestown was founded.
1609. Hudson discovered the Hudson River.
1610. The starving time.
1619. The first legislative assembly in America was convened in
Virginia.
The book was not interesting, but it was well written. Ella’s heart
was won by the first sentence. This read, “The honor of the discovery
of America belongs to Christopher Columbus as an individual, and to
Spain as a nation.” The swing, the balance of the words pleased her.
She did not know whether it was good or bad, but she did know that
she liked it and liked to say it over and over.
The first draft of her composition on “Printing” read, “The honor
of inventing printing belongs to Gutenberg as an individual and to
Germany as a nation.” But she decided that it was not quite fair
to borrow the sound of a whole sentence from some one else; so she
compromised by taking half of it.
At the end of the second day’s use of the book, she came home quite
in despair.
“I just can’t do it,” she lamented. “I thought it was nice, for it
told about Columbus when he was a boy, and about his trying so hard
to get some rich king to help him find the way to India by sailing
across the Atlantic. The assistant said she did not want us to learn
it word for word, and I didn’t. I told it just as I would a story;
and I left out that he studied geometry; and it was counted a half
failure. I don’t see why any one could not cross the ocean without
studying geometry; and I haven’t the least idea what geometry is,
anyway.”
The history went on with struggles and unhappiness, for it was never
easy for Ella to learn anything word for word, and she found that
while this was neither required nor desired, it was nevertheless the
only way to make sure of bringing in every detail, and thus avoiding
failures and half failures.
Through discoveries and colonies and Indian wars she toiled and part
way through the Revolutionary War. Then one day a little girl with
bright eyes and glowing cheeks threw open the door of her home and
cried:
“I can do it now, mother. They never seemed like real people, but
they do now, and some of them are buried in our own cemetery. I found
one just now that said, ‘Fell at Bunker Hill.’”
This was rather confused, but little by little the mother understood
the situation. An old Revolutionary cemetery lay in the heart of
the city, and through it ran the nearest way to school. The city
authorities would have been glad to get rid of it and took no care
of the place, made no repairs, and did not object to its being used
as a playground. Most of the stone wall around it had tumbled down.
Monuments were lying on the ground, the door of a tomb had been
shattered; but yet it was beautiful, for flowers grew everywhere.
Under the trees were white stars of Bethlehem. Violets, daisies,
and buttercups were scattered through the grass. Shady lots were
covered with periwinkle, and sunny ones were bright and cheery
with trim little none-so-pretties. Lilacs, white roses, red roses,
and yellow Harrison roses peered through the broken palings of the
fences. Lilies of the valley ran in friendly fashion from one lot to
another. In spite of the neglect, or perhaps because of it, the old
cemetery was a happy place for children, and they enjoyed it. On the
way home it had suddenly entered Ella’s head to compare the dates on
the stones with those in her history; and in a flash the whole story
became real. She had found not only the grave of one who was killed
at Bunker Hill, but of one who had been with John Paul Jones in
battle on the sea. From that day, history was as real to Ella as the
things she could remember in her own life.
She told Alma about her discovery.
“Do you believe we ought to play here,” said Alma, “now that they
seem like real living people?”
But Ella had not forgotten her fancy that the dead folk of the little
churchyard in the mountains liked to have people come there to eat
their Sunday lunch and chat a little together. She remembered too one
day when her father and mother and she were walking in a cemetery.
She was a tiny child and she began to play on one of the graves. The
mother called her away, but the father said, “Oh, let her play. I
think if I were there, I should like to have little children come and
play around my grave.”
She said to Alma rather shyly,
“I think maybe they’d like to have us.”
“Perhaps they would,” said Alma, “if we played gently and had kind
thoughts about them.”
“Of course we should play gently,” said Ella. “We’re not small
children any longer. We shall go to the high school in one year more.
Oh, I want to go now. I want to be grown up. Don’t you?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps. Why do you want to?”
“One reason is so I can go up in the Fourth of July balloon. I’ve
always wanted to, and I will if I ever have five dollars that I can
spend just as I like. I suppose I shan’t ever ride in a swanboat, for
I’m too old. But let’s go on with the history lesson. Perhaps we’ll
find that some of the people in it are here. If they are, let’s pick
some flowers and put on their graves.”
With this new inspiration the children roamed about the old cemetery,
examining dates and inscriptions.
“Here’s one marked ‘Howe,’” said Ella, “and it says that he died in
battle in 1778.”
“Maybe he was related to Admiral Howe,” Alma suggested.
“How he must have felt, then, to have his own uncle—I guess he was
an uncle—fighting against the Americans,” said Ella. “Suppose it had
been Washington who died in 1778?” she added thoughtfully.
“Then maybe we’d be under a king or a queen. How queer it would be
to talk about ‘Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain and the United
States of America.’”
“I don’t believe we’d be under a queen at all. Something would have
been sure to happen.”
Both the little girls looked forward with pleasure to the recitation
in history on the following day, but they were disappointed, for
just before the class was to be called, visitors came in and asked
especially if they might hear one of the classes in reading.
There were of course more visitors to the First Room than to the
lower grades. One was the superintendent of schools. He used to drop
in informally, chat a little in a friendly fashion, and then, when
the boys and girls were quite at their ease, he would examine a
class or two, look at the maps that had been drawn, make a note, both
aloud and in his notebook, of anything that he especially liked, and
say good-bye quite as if he had been visiting at their homes.
Members of the school committee had the privilege of making speeches
to the pupils. If a man could win a place on this committee, he
could, even if he had no talent for public speaking, enjoy all the
rewards of eloquence, for he was sure of an audience who would hang
upon his words and whose faces would express genuine regret when his
speech was evidently drawing to a close.
It was Ella who let the secret out. Once after there had been an
address that was both long and dull, the assistant said to her at
recess:
“I was pleased to see how attentive you were to our visitor this
morning. That was real courtesy.”
“I wanted him to keep on talking,” Ella replied.
“Did you?” questioned the assistant, with a note of surprise that
would slip into her voice, quite against her intentions.
“Yes, because if he had talked only ten minutes longer, it would have
been too late to have any geography recitation, and I didn’t know the
lesson so very well,” replied Ella serenely. “I tried to look just as
interested as I possibly could, so he would keep on talking.”
Even if the committee men were not all the most eloquent of public
speakers, they rarely failed to have something definite to say
and to say it in a way that would make it “stick,” which after all
is about as much as any orator can hope to accomplish. One of them
brought a stranger with him one day, who asked to see the drawing of
maps on the blackboard from memory.
“Very well,” said the principal. “Class in geography.—What is your
State?” he asked the guest.
“Georgia,” the guest replied.
“The class may put an outline of Georgia on the board,” said the
principal. “North—northeast—east—southwest. Put in the ranges of
mountains.” Six rivers were drawn in and the location of six towns
marked. It was done too rapidly for even a glance at a neighbor’s
map, and with few mistakes.
When the maps were done, the guest spoke highly of the work, the
accuracy and the speed manifested. “It was quite a coincidence,” he
said, “that their lesson should have been my own State.”
“Their lesson was on Southern Asia,” said the principal quietly, “but
what they have once learned, they are responsible for at any moment.
Will you say a few words to the pupils?” he asked the committee man,
for that was the courtesy demanded by the occasion.
The committee man rose rather ponderously and looked the room over.
Then he said:
“You’ve studied about the equator, of course; and now I want to know
what a ship does when it comes to the equator. Does it sail over it,
or break through it, or what?”
No one said a word. The duller pupils were a little shy. The brighter
ones were afraid of some catch, and there was silence. The committee
man looked up and down the class. Finally, he pointed his long finger
to the farthest corner of the room and said:
“I’d like that boy with red hair to answer the question.”
The boy with red hair was sensitive about bright colors. His face
turned scarlet while the rest of the class giggled.
“I want that boy with red hair to answer,” repeated the committee
man. “I’ve noticed that when a boy has red hair, he usually has some
pretty good brains under it.”
The laugh was turned. The boy with red hair now plucked up courage
and said, “The equator is an imaginary line. There is nothing to get
over.”
“Good,” said the committee man. “You are the kind of boy I thought
you were. Now, don’t forget that the equator isn’t the only
difficulty in the world that you will find to be imaginary when you
come to it. Good-bye.”
Another visitor told interesting stories about the little red
schoolhouse that he attended as a boy, about getting out of bed
before light cold winter mornings to help with the farm work before
he went to school; of ploughing his way through snowdrifts, of making
hay and digging potatoes and threshing grain, of working all day in
the hot sun.
“Now, boys,” he said at the close, “I have a secret to tell you.
You think it’s rather hard—don’t you?—to be called at eight o’clock
in the morning, eat breakfast, and get to school by nine? Well,
the secret is that while you are making yourselves comfortable the
country boys are making themselves ready to come here to the city a
few years from now to take your places. I wonder what you are going
to do about it. You want those good places, and there is just one way
by which you can hold on to them. It is this, ‘Work hard and don’t
grumble.’”
Another committee man talked about perseverance. At the end of his
little address he said:
“We have been talking about perseverance, and now I am going to ask
you to do something that will make you remember this talk as long as
you live. I want you to sing ‘Go on, go on, go on, go on,’ to the
tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne.’”
It was sung, and there is no question that it was remembered.