But here sits a man who has travelled upon the Caribbean Sea, and therefore there must be such a place. Our youthful fancies do get severe jolts! From my own experience I infer that much of our teaching in the schools doesn't take hold, that the boys and girls tolerate it but do not believe. I cannot recall just when I first began to believe in Mt. Vesuvius, but I am quite certain that it was not in my school-days. It may have been in my teaching-days, but I'm not quite certain. I have often wondered whether we teachers really believe all we try to teach. I feel a pity for poor Sisyphus, poor fellow, rolling that stone to the top of the hill, and then having to do the work all over when the stone rolled to the bottom. But that is not much worse than trying to teach Caribbean Sea and Mt. Vesuvius, if we can't really believe in them. But here is Brown, metamorphosed into a psychologist who begins with the known, yea, delightfully known grapefruit which I had at breakfast, and takes me on a fascinating excursion till I arrive, by alluring stages, at the related unknown, the Caribbean Sea. Too bad that Brown isn't a teacher.

Brown has the gift of holding on to a thing till his craving for knowledge is satisfied. Somewhere he had come upon some question touching a campanile or, possibly, the Campanile, as it seemed to him. Nor would he rest content until I had extracted what the books have to say on the subject. He had in mind the Campanile at Venice, not knowing that the one beside the Duomo at Florence is higher than the one at Venice, and that the Leaning Tower at Pisa is a campanile, or bell-tower, also. When I told him that one of my friends saw the Campanile at Venice crumble to a heap of ruins on that Sunday morning back in 1907, and that another friend had been of the last party to go to the top of it the evening before, he became quite excited, and then I knew that I had succeeded in investing the subject with human interest, and I felt quite the schoolmaster. Nothing of this did I mention to Brown, for there is no need to exploit the mental machinery if only you get results.

Many people who travel abroad buy postcards by the score, and seem to feel that they are the original discoverers of the places which these cards portray, and yet these very places were the background of much of their history and geography in the schools. Can it be that their teachers failed to invest these places with human interest, that they were but words in a book and not real to them at all? Must I travel all the way to Yellowstone Park to know a geyser? Alas! in that case, many of us poor school-teachers must go through life geyserless. Wondrous tales and oft heard I in my school-days of glacier, iceberg, canyon, snow-covered mountain, grotto, causeway, and volcano, but not till I came to Grindelwald did I really know what a glacier is. There's many a Doubting Thomas in the schools.

CHAPTER IV

PSYCHOLOGICAL

The psychologist is so insistent in proclaiming his doctrine of negative self-feeling and positive self-feeling that one is impelled to listen out of curiosity, if nothing else. Then, just as you are beginning to get a little glimmering as to his meaning, another one begins to assail your ears with a deal of sesquipedalian English about the emotion of subjection and the emotion of elation. Just as I began to think I was getting a grip of the thing a college chap came in and proceeded to enlighten me by saying that these two emotions may be generated only by personal relations, and not by relations of persons and things. I was thinking of my emotion of subjection in the presence of an original problem in geometry, but this college person tells me that this negative self-feeling, according to psychology, is experienced only in the presence of another person. Well, I have had that experience, too. In fact, my negative self-feeling is of frequent occurrence. Jacob must have had a rather severe attack of the emotion of subjection when he was trying to escape from the wrath of Esau. But, after his experience at Bethel, where he received a blessing and a promise, there was a shifting from the negative self-feeling to the positive—from the emotion of subjection to that of elation.

The stone which Jacob used that night as a pillow, so we are told, is called the Stone of Scone, and is to be seen in the body of the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey. The use of that stone as a part of the chair might seem to be a psychological coincidence, unless, indeed, we can conceive that the fabricators of the chair combined a knowledge of psychology and also of the Bible in its construction. It is an interesting conceit, at any rate, that the stone might bring to kings and queens a blessing and a promise, as it had done for Jacob, averting the emotion of subjection and perpetuating the emotion of elation.

Now, there's Hazzard, the big, glorious Hazzard. I met him first on the deck of the S. S. Campania, and I gladly agreed to his proposal that we travel together. He is a large man (one need not be more specific) and a veritable steam-engine of activity and energy. It was altogether natural, therefore, that he should assume the leadership of our party of two in all matters touching places, modes of travel, hotels, and other details large and small, while I trailed along in his wake. This order continued for some days, and I, of course, experienced all the while the emotion of subjection in some degree. When we came to the Isle of Man we puzzled our heads no little over the curious coat of arms of that quaint little country. This coat of arms is three human legs, equidistant from one another. At Peel we made numerous inquiries, and also at Ramsey, but to no avail. In the evening, however, in the hotel at Douglas I saw a picture of this coat of arms, accompanied by the inscription, Quocumque jeceris stabit, and gave some sort of translation of it. Then and there came my emancipation, for after that I was consulted and deferred to during all the weeks we were together. It is quite improbable that Hazzard himself realized any change in our relations, but unconsciously paid that subtle tribute to my small knowledge of Latin. When we came to Stratford I did not call upon Miss Marie Corelli, for I had heard that she is quite averse to men as a class, and I feared I might suffer an emotional collapse. I was so comfortable in my newly acquainted emotion of elation that I decided to run no risks.

When at length I resumed my schoolmastering I determined to give the boys and girls the benefit of my recent discovery. I saw that I must generate in each one, if possible, the emotion of elation, that I must so arrange school situations that mastery would become a habit with them if they were to become "masters in the kingdom of life," as my friend Long says it. I saw at once that the difficulties must be made only high enough to incite them to effort, but not so high as to cause discouragement. I recalled the sentence in Harvey's Grammar: "Milo began to lift the ox when he was a calf." After we had succeeded in locating the antecedent of "he" we learned from this sentence a lesson of value, and I recalled this lesson in my efforts to inculcate progressive mastery in the boys and girls of my school. I sometimes deferred a difficult problem for a few days till they had lifted the growing calf a few more times, and then returned to it. Some one says that everything is infinitely high that we can't see over, so I was careful to arrange the barriers just a bit lower than the eye-line of my pupils, and then raise them a trifle on each succeeding day. In this way I strove to generate the positive self-feeling so that there should be no depression and no white flag. And that surely was worth a trip to the Isle of Man, even if one failed to see one of their tailless cats.

I had occasion or, rather, I took occasion at