work, it was purely accidental. I was not conscious either of its
presence or its absence, and so deserve neither praise nor censure.
I had one pupil who was nine years my senior, and I did not even know
that he was retarded. I recall quite distinctly that he had a
luxuriant crop of chin-whiskers but even these did not disturb the
procedure of that school. We accepted him as he was, whiskers
included, and went on our complacent way. He was blind in one eye
and somewhat deaf, but no one ever thought of him as abnormal or
subnormal. Even if we had known these words we should have been too
polite to apply them to him. In fact, we had no black-list, of any
sort, in that school. I have never been able to determine whether
the absence of such a list was due to ignorance, or innocence, or
both. So long as he found the school an agreeable place in which to
spend the winter, and did not interfere with the work of others, I
could see no good reason why he should not be there and get what he
could from the lessons in spelling, geography, and arithmetic. I do
not mention grammar for that was quite beyond him. The agreement of
subject and verb was one of life's great mysteries to him. So I
permitted him to browse around in such pastures as seemed finite to
him, and let the infinite grammar go by default so far as he was
concerned.

I have but the most meagre acquaintance with the pedagogical dicta of
the books--a mere bowing acquaintance--but, at that time, I had not
even been introduced to any of these. But, as the saying goes, "The
Lord takes care of fools and children," and, so, somehow, by sheer
blind luck, I instinctively veered away from the Procrustean bed
idea, and found some work for my bewhiskered disciple that connected
with his native dispositions. Had any one told me I was doing any
such things I think I should, probably, have asked him how to spell