lifted the growing calf a few more times, and then returned to it.
Some one says that everything is infinitely high that we can't see
over, so I was careful to arrange the barriers just a bit lower than
the eye-line of my pupils, and then raise them a trifle on each
succeeding day. In this way I strove to generate the positive
self-feeling so that there should be no depression and no white flag.
And that surely was worth a trip to the Isle of Man, even if one
failed to see one of their tailless cats.

I had occasion or, rather, I took occasion at one time to punish a
boy with a fair degree of severity (may the Lord forgive me), and
now. I know that in so doing I was guilty of a grave error. What I
interpreted as misconduct was but a straining at his leash in an
effort to extricate himself from the incubus of the negative
self-feeling. He was, and probably is, a dull fellow and realized
that he could not cope with the other boys in the school studies, and
so was but trying to win some notice in other fields of activity. To
him notoriety was preferable to obscurity. If I had only been wise I
would have turned his inclination to good account and might have
helped him to self-mastery, if not to the mastery of algebra. He
yearned for the emotion of elation, and I was trying to perpetuate
his emotion of subjection. If Methuselah had been a schoolmaster he
might have attained proficiency by the time he reached the age of
nine hundred and sixty-eight years if he had been a close observer, a
close student of methods, and had been willing and able to profit by
his own mistakes.

Friend Virgil says something like this: "They can because they think
they can," and I heartily concur. Some one tells us that Kent in
"King Lear" got his name from the Anglo-Saxon word can and he was