of the boys were named after the leaders upon both sides. All the boys
thought it was a fine thing, and Barnes noticed that they were so
anxious to get to the history lesson that they could hardly say their
other lessons properly.

When the time came, Barnes ranged the Romans upon one side of the room
and the Carthaginians on the other. The recitation was very spirited,
each party telling about its deeds with extraordinary unction. After a
while Barnes asked a Roman to describe the battle of Cannæ. Whereupon
the Romans hurled their copies of Wayland's Moral Science at the
enemy. Then the Carthaginians made a battering-ram out of a bench and
jammed it among the Romans, who retaliated with a volley of books,
slates and chewed paper-balls. Barnes concluded that the battle of
Cannæ had been sufficiently illustrated, and he tried to stop it;
but the warriors considered it too good a thing to let drop, and
accordingly the Carthaginians dashed over to the Romans with another
battering-ram and thumped a couple of them savagely.

Then the Romans turned in, and the fight became general. A
Carthaginian would grasp a Roman by the hair and hustle him around
over the desk in a manner that was simply frightful, and a Roman would
give a fiendish whoop and knock a Carthaginian over the head with
Greenleaf's Arithmetic. Hannibal got the head of Scipio Africanus
under his arm, and Scipio, in his efforts to break away, stumbled,
and the two generals fell and had a rough-and-tumble fight under the
blackboard. Caius Gracchus prodded Hamilcar with a ruler, and the
latter in his struggles to get loose fell against the stove and
knocked down about thirty feet of stove-pipe. Thereupon the Romans
made a grand rally, and in five minutes they chased the entire
Carthaginian army out of the school-room, and Barnes along with it;