and Abel, and Noah's travels with a menagerie, all learned by rote. The
entire school then arose and bowed me out.

A visit to a mixed school, presided over by carelessly dressed maidens
of uncertain age and the all-knowing glance of those who feel the world
and all its knowledge lies concentrated in the hollow of their hands,
showed a quite similar method of instruction. On the wall hung a great
lithograph depicting in all its dreadful details the alleged horrors of
"alcoolismo." Even the teachers rattled off their questions with an
atrocious, half-enunciated pronunciation, and he must have been a
Spanish scholar indeed who could have caught more than the gist of the
recited answers. This indistinctness of enunciation and the Catholic
system of learning by rote instead of permitting the development of
individual power to think were as marked even in the _colegio_,
corresponding roughly to our high schools. Even there the professor
never commanded, "More distinctly!" but he frequently cried, "Faster!"

On the wall of this higher institution was a stern set of rules, among
which some of the most important were:

"Students must not smoke in the presence of professors," though this was
but mildly observed, for when I entered the study room with the director
and his assistant, all of us smoking, the boys, averaging fifteen years
of age, merely held their lighted cigarettes half out of sight behind
them until we passed. Another rule read: "Any student frequenting a
tavern, cafe chantant, or house of ill-fame may be expelled." He might
run that risk in most schools, but none but the Latinized races would
announce the fact in plain words on the bulletin-boards. The director
complained that the recent revolutions had set the school far back, as
each government left it to the next to provide for such secondary