So Amos did not teach the first year that his friends and relations
wanted him to. His friends and relations, however, had their own way
about it after all, for they met and resolved that it should be "Amos
or nobody," and they got the latter. That is, they asked the examiner
to send them a teacher if he would not let them have the one they
wanted.

The examiner asked them what they would pay for a good teacher and they
replied, "Twenty dollars a month!" The poor man sent them the best he
had for that money, but it was of so poor a quality that it could ill
stand the strain put upon it by the wrangling and angered patrons of
"deestrick four," and it broke down before the school had run a month.

This year they had tried the same thing again, and the examiner, in
sheer despair, gave them their way, as perhaps the lesser of two evils.

If any one thinks this an unnatural picture, please address, stamp
enclosed, any one of the one hundred and two county superintendents of
schools in Illinois, and if you don't get what you want to know, then
try Iowa, or Ohio, or Pennsylvania, or even the old Bay State. The
quality is largely distributed, and specimens can be picked up in
almost any locality where it is made possible by the system that
permits such a condition.

This was the teacher to whom "Dodd" came on an October morning, just
preceding his ninth birthday. Amos had heard much of Elder Weaver and
had boasted not a little of how he would "out argy" him the first
"lick" he got at him, and he gazed on these small scions of so notable
a stock with a feeling that the contest had already begun. He put the