Excerpt from A Great Year of Our Lives: At the Old Squire's

The day they to-re the old house down I really felt quite sad. It does not seem like the same place there now, and memory runs back somewhat regretfully, as I pass to those Old eventful winter terms under Master Joel Pierson, Master Cummings, Master French and young Thomas Jefferson Cobb who was drowned in the Kennebec. Excellent teachers they were; possibly there are as good instructors now, but I cannot help doubting it.

We set great store by our winter school then, and SO would boys and girls at present, if they had but ten weeks a year, for only girls and little boys attended the summer school. Throughout the entire year we doted on that coming winter term of school.

Really, we made remarkable progress; those Old masters pushed us lovingly on. In one winter, when fourteen, my cousin Addison mastered Greenleaf's National Arithmetic and could perform every example in it; but to do this he had worked morning and evening as well as during school hours. Those teachers possessed the gift -of firing our hearts with an ambition to learn. How did they do it? Their own hearts were in it. To this day I feel the thrill of Master Pierson's enthusiasm and his faith in us, as he laid out long lessons and somehow made us feel sure that we could learn them. What a true friend he was' I take Off my hat reverently to his memory.

They were all good teachers, every one - but no, there was an exception. We did have one poor teacher, yes, he was a bad teacher. It came about in a Singular way. It was the year rum reigned in No. II, for that was the way we always referred to it. That winter the winter of 1867 there was a strange state of things at the old schoolhouse. I shall have to explain it a little.

In Maine at that time, each and every country school district governed itself and managed its own affairs. A school meeting of the legal residents of the district was held every Spring to elect a school agent, bid off teacher's board, fuel, etc. The agent chosen hired the teachers and was in charge of the school property. The day of centralism and supervisors was not yet. In the matter of its school business every district was a small republic, largely independent of the town or county in which it was Situated.

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