Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/129

leaving the yards turned round opposite the building and wished to God that I had the command of a battery of twenty-four pounders for a day to blow the school to atoms. For years after I left the school, when I saw my teacher coming in the street, I took the opposite pavement.

So much for the education that had been ordered and paid for. His estimate of his schooling for the next two years is equally interesting. From the High School he went to the University of Edinburgh. With his first teacher he studied geography and mathematics, but, as his capacity for learning words was slender, he forgot yesterday's lesson in learning to day's, while in mathematics the demonstrations he repeated evaporated as fast as they were learned. But for several months his sole fellow student in geography was a young sailor from the middle ranks, who was very profligate, though bold and generous, and he related to Combe the histories of his corrupt experiences. Happily, however, they had no allurements for the lad, and increased his knowledge without subverting his morals. Of his experiences in Dr. Hill's Latin class, he says:

I could not master the lessons, and had no assistance at home. As we were now young gentlemen, there was no corporal punishment, no place-taking, no keeping-in. Those able and willing to learn were taught, the rest were left unmolested, if they kept quiet and let business go on. The boys in my condition took back seats, and let the clever boys sit in the front ones next the Professor.

He and they went on harmoniously and successfully; Combe listened, and learned what he could. But he says:

I must record one great benefit I derived from the lax discipline of all my teachers in the years 1802-’3. In those years my brain got nearly a complete rest; and as I was growing rapidly this was an advantage which in its ultimate consequences counterbalanced my losses by habitual indolence. I had a conscience, and in all my previous attendance at school it urged me to do my best, and punished me with painful upbraidings when I sacrificed duty to pleasure, which was not often; and thus my nervous system had been kept on the stretch, my brain had been overtasked and my health and growth impaired. But in these two years my brain got a rest, for my conscience was to some degree involved in my general apathy.

We have no room for details of his Sunday training. Like all the rest of his so-called education it was unintelligible, burdensome, discouraging. He envied the cattle that had no souls, and he envied his brother Abram, whose light disposition enabled him to throw Calvinism to the winds, and make witty sarcasms and jokes out of the materials it afforded. In 1802 he lost a brother, ten months old, of small-pox, and in 1807 a sister just younger than himself, who had been ill for many years. These events excited and bewildered him, but the example of his parents taught him not to complain of sufferings "sent by the hand of God."

He says that about the year 1802-’3 he first became conscious of