boys and girls through the mysteries of lands and seas, icebergs,
trade winds, deserts, and plains. Still patiently they marked for the
boy's bewildered brain latitude and longitude, the tropic of cancer,
the arctic circle, and the poles. Were they hanging there still? the
man wondered. Were they still patiently leading the way through a
wilderness of islands and peninsulas, capes and continents, rivers,
lakes, and sounds? Or had they, in the years that had gone since he
looked upon their learned faces, been sunk to oblivion in the depths
of their own oceans by the weight of their own mountain ranges? And,
suddenly, the man who sought Knowledge in facts found himself wishing
in his heart that some gracious being would make for older children
maps and charts that they might know where flow the rivers of
prosperity, where rise the mountains of fame, where ripple the lakes
of love, where sleep the valleys of rest, or where thunders the ocean
of truth.

At one end of the old schoolroom, behind the teacher's desk, was a
blackboard with its accompanying chalk, erasers, rulers, and bits of
string. To the boy, that blackboard was a trial, a temptation, a
vindication, or a betrayal. Often, as he sat with his class on the
long recitation seat that faced the teacher's desk, with half studied
lesson, but with bright hopes of passing the twenty minutes safely,
before the slow hand of the old clock had marked but half the time,
his hopes would be blasted by a call to the board where he would bring
upon himself the ridicule of his schoolmates, the condemnation of the
teacher, and would take his seat to hear, with burning cheeks, the
awful sentence: "You may study your lesson after school."

After school--sorrowfully the boy saw the others passing from the
room, leaving him behind. And the last to go, glancing back with tear