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Show Inih mountain .Sdiool I Seumas fflacManus Tells How the Youth of His Loved Don- egal Are Educated Teacher is Held in Reverence, i ' . (Copyright, 1900, by Seumas MacManus.) The tribute of reverence and resoect which even the totally unlettered amongs us yield to education gives the schoolmaster rank next to the priest in importance. Every one does him homage, hom-age, every one envies him his vast knowledge and great mind and lefty position, po-sition, and every one is pleased and proud of the honor of his friendship for in his noble generosity he is on terms of intimate friendship with every man, woman and child in all his wide bai'iwick. For Dennis, for Barney, for Nelly and Maura, whom he meets upon the road at home, or meets from home, at fair or market, he has a warm handshake and a kindly inquiry after child or parent. par-ent. He asks interestedly, too, whaf Shan is going to do with all the meadow mead-ow he has in the Black Bottom this year; how the spuds are doing in Charley's Char-ley's lea field; whether we Monica's toothache is any better; and sends word S jL" LEARNING THEIR TASKS. to old Nanny Gallagher that if she tried three spoonfuls of buttermilk and baking bak-ing soda three times a day it would be bjg ease to the heartburn that's troubling troub-ling her r.ince Christmas. And when a great man concerns himself him-self so with the hopes and troubles of common people 'tis small wonder he should be madtran idol. But his kindliness does not stop at this. He is scribe , for all the countryside country-side dwellers, writes their letters and draws up their wills and their agreements, agree-ments, arbitrates in their disputes and advises them in their perplexities. He cheers the sick by the honor of his visit vis-it and by lending the lustre of his presence pres-ence and the dazzle of his discourse at wedding, wake and spree, he does many another humble friend proud. When the American letter comes to those who were hungering for it at home, though in turn every old croini-ach croini-ach in the neighborhood has attacked it with his scratched glasses and wrestled the full meaning from the inartistic sprawls of poor Jimmy, who scorns the finnicky subtleties of punctuation, the missive, must finally be brought to the masther, who, it is universally conceded, conced-ed, can take more out of a' letter than all the wiseheads in the parish put together. to-gether. Moreover, he can tell exactly how far back in the country Jimmy is, whether he is in the neighborhood of the falls of Niagara 'or the Rocky mountains, and, in terms' of the distance dis-tance "betwen here and Dublin," can say how far, approximately, Jimmy now is from Neil Mughan's eldest son, John. His Task as a Scribe. When, again, Jimmy has go to be replied re-plied to, who so fit even who so willing to write the letter as the masther? Who knows better than he just how to put down in proper language the statement state-ment of Jimmy's mother? Who knows so well not only what to let Jimmv : . know,, but likewise what not to leV him know for in our letters to those who are struggling for us in America, repression re-pression and suppression call for more and defter art than expression. Jimmy must be shown a fairly accurate picture of how his poor mother and father are faring he must get a hint of the sore circumstances that are pressing and of the clouds that are looming he must get a hint of these or he would reproach i mUI, , ' i i ' them sorely again; but the poor boy . must not be given to know their mis- fortune in its nakedness poor Jimmv. God help him, has his own struggle all I alone amongst the "black," ie: utter j strangers, and it would ill become his father and mother to damp his courage, and to make his heart grieve more than already it does. . So, despite all, the ring of the letter must be cheery, and the ; coloring of it optimistic. A sunny out-i out-i lok must illume it, and the good God's ! unforgetfulness of those who implicitly j trust in his must be emphasized. And I right well can the masther be trusted to do all that, for when, with a pardona-1 pardona-1 ble touch of oratorical conceit and a 1 pardonable litle vanity of diction, he I reads aloud the -completed epistle, the eyes of Jimmy's mother run over, and often she has got to go away without thanking him in words. At the wake, and at the ceilidh, and in the chapel yard before mass all disputed questions, political, historical, astronomical or sociological, are finally referred to him not, however, till all parties to the dispute have exhausted their argumentative eloquence on the one side and on the other. He gravely grave-ly listens to the. summary made out by both; re views it with a lofty absence of partiality that raises him far above the mortals who look and listen and wait: and he gives his decision de-cision with a judicial calm and an assured as-sured preciseness that places the matter mat-ter beyond question or cavil in that parish for evermore. The master would not be human if he denied himself vanity. So he has vanity but vanity of such an innocent and pardonable kind that its chief effect ef-fect is to mellow his nature and make him more kindly and more loving toward to-ward humanity at large, and more loved and more reverenced by his circle of worshipers. And, as with us, 'tis in his own country coun-try a prophet gets most honor, beyond be-yond the bounds of his own parish the master's fame . is eclipsed by that of him who wields the rule, and whose word is law in the next parish. Consequently, Con-sequently, when the men of different parishes meet at a wake, not infrequently infre-quently do they wage a wordy war in assertion of the claims of their respective re-spective masthers to signal pre-eminence among his fellows. Where the Master Is King1. But, after all, it is in his own little castle that lie is truly and undisputed-ly undisputed-ly king in his own little low thatched school house a house fitter in size for twenty pupils than for the 100 which often crowd it. A motley hundred of all sizes, from the babbling infant sent to school to keep it out of the way, to the moustached young man who has come in the idle days of winter to brush up his much-neglected literary requirements before sailing for the states where he is ambitious of being able to write his own letter home. They are of both sexes and of all descrip- . - ' ' 11 IUI II SEUMAS MAC MANTIS AND HIS LITTLE ELOCK (Taken a Few Years Ago When He Was Master of Glen .'i; f " ,, Coagh School in Donegal.) . ' - , tions, wear every variety of dress, and are alike in one thing only the amount of noise they make. For into the little lit-tle house each carries the pitch of voice he used on the hills. Every one shouts for himself and tries to outshout his neighbor. The only thing. I have met with elsewhere to remind me of a little national school in the hills is the New York stock exchange on a day of panic. pan-ic. The most extraordinary thing is I that the master can know what every one of his 100 pupils is saying what lesson this one is committing to memory, mem-ory, (for each treats his memory as if it were hard of hearing), what request that one is hurling at him. what nicknames nick-names the next two are swapping and what problem a fifth is confusing. His young Confucians. as he stylos them, collect at 10 o'clock, each with a piece of turf, his tribute to the school I fire, under his arm. Some of them, indeed, -are at the school house and have successfully brought oil a few-pugilistic few-pugilistic encounters before the teacher himself arrives at 9:30, but these are they who live four or six miles off, and got up before the screek o' clay and had the'r breakfast by the light of the fire. Others do not arrive till just before be-fore roll call at 11 o'clock; these are pupils, of course, who live within call of the school house and can easily afford af-ford to take their leisure in the morning. morn-ing. Most of them are barefooted, unless un-less there is much snow on the ground, but when the weather is good few burden bur-den their feet with unnecessary covering. cover-ing. The first duty of. the clay in the punishment pun-ishment of the schemers who remained from school on yesterday, and, for instance, in-stance, built up Owen a-Dunnion's, filling every door and window of the cottage with snow, and then added insult in-sult to injury by getting on the roof top and satirizing Owen down the chimney.' A moral discourse from the master, italicized by two heavy slaps of a rattan cane on each hand of each criminal, disposes of this. Then six classes are formed. The master takes charge of one and leaves the others under sruidance of forward pupils from the higher ranks. Half the classes sit and half of them stand; and at the end of each half hour they exchange positions. The school work goes on, uninterrupted by play, till 3 o'clock. But, though there is no officially recognized play hour, the young rascals indulge in many lessons not specifically provided for in the school time table. That bunch of huddling hud-dling heads which the master, good man, believes to be racking and wrestling wres-tling with the intricacies of fractions only indicate an eager audience to a fascinating Fenian tale and that other group that he thinks are sathering grammatical crumbs at the feet. of Phelimy Owen McGragh, are harkening in awed astonishment to Phelimy's recital of how the big eel of Loch Peiste chased his father for five miles over the hil'.s. Phelimy's father, indeed, in-deed, had at first faced it with the scythe and cut it quite through, but since it united again as fast as he cut it he finally ran for self preservation rather than cowardice: and other schemers are engaged in the bloodless but exciting war of fox and geese, in crossy-crowny, in playing pins, or in the gamble of mammy-daddy-child-or-babbr. The Old Hedge School Days. In the old Hedge school days, which ended half a century ago (and, indeed, in still later times), tire' master . followed fol-lowed the individual system of teaching; teach-ing; that is, whilst the other pupils sat around the walls assaulting their "tasks," the master called each in turn to his rostrum, examined his lessons and, appointing new "tasks" to be absorbed ab-sorbed before the morrow, sent him to his place. He began with number one at 10 o'clock and finished with the last pupil at 3. Then he went home with one of the students for he was entertained a week by each. "Where do you stop?" a stranger asked one of these peregrinating pere-grinating masters. "Sir," he replied, "I have as many stops as a Universal" (a Universal spelling book.") In those days spelling (which was taught according to the syllabic method) meth-od) was the test of the scholar and he was classified according to the statute measure of the words he could tackle and successly negotiate. The child who started with a, b, ab, graduated grad-uated upon Philadelphia and Antitrini-tarian. Antitrini-tarian. It is something more than sixty years since our. beneficent rules 'uch-safed 'uch-safed us a system of public school education, ed-ucation, called national because our language, our literature and our history his-tory were strictly barred from its curriculum. cur-riculum. But. thank God, in a few years more our Gaelic will, after strenuous stren-uous efforts, get its place in our schools. Every one of the rising generation gene-ration is being educated by a fine staff of able and underpaid teachers. Our enforced ignorance with which our rulers rul-ers used chivalrously to twit us is disappearinghas dis-appearinghas disappeared; and the children of Ireland will soon set the place they deserve amongst enlightened peoples. Half a century ago the teacher's salary sal-ary was $90 a year, and 2 or S cents per week in school fees from each pupil. Today about $275 is the average year-' lv salary, and in addition, (1) Ti'aTf a dollar for each serarate subject in which each pupil answers satisfactorily satisfactor-ily at the annual examination; and (2) J a fee from the treasury (in lieu of re- i cently abolished school fees) of 02 fori each child in yearly average attend- ; ance. The total average salary of a teacher in a school of sixty pupils j amounts to- about $100. Each school is in charge of a patron or manager (almost always a clergyman), and th. teacher is appointed and may be removed re-moved by him. SKUMAS MacMANL'S. |