The great West. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1889-18??, 1889-11-01

says the cQ1tOr OF the cleveland, w.,
Union. There is the elderly teacher
of matronly proportions and the lovely
but inexperienced girl who has just
dotted her beautiful graduating dress
and taken upon her young shoulders
the training of room full Of young
sters whose highest ambition is to
throw spit balls and make faces behind
the teachers back. The girl school
teacher is sweet creature, but it is
the elderly, matronly appearing teach
er, with a good fund of experience,
who is much more capable of controll-
ing a large body Of children. The
latter is not so liable to fly off the
handle when she catches girl writing
notes or boy peppering the surround
ing landscape with spit balls. She is
also more capable of making the pun
ishment fit the crime in case
seance with a fractions pupil becomes
an overpowering necessity. When
one of the inexperienced girl teachers
in a moment of etreme irritability in
dulges in the art of corporal punish
ment, there is always more or less fun
for the school and disarrangement of
wearing apparel for her. Unfortu-
nately. it is also one of those utterly
incomprehensible freaks of nature that
the smaller and paler and sicklier the
teacher the bigger and more vicious
the boy that she tackles. There is
degrading in the spectacle
of fragile, well educated, unmarried
female school teacher dancing madly
up and down the room in the embrace
of an overgrown boy with dirty nose
and a sore heel. Memory brings to
my minds eye the scenes of the bent
pin, slapped ear days of my youth. 1
was boy with a studded toe and many
freckles. was also a nuisance to the
world at large and sort of gymnasium
to the teachers. had but one virtue
Il, a patient little cuss. 1
kindly allowed the girl teacher to
bend my fingers back as though the
knuckles worked on hinges and chase
the flies off of my soiled palm with a
big ruler. Then l retired to my seat
and wrote notes to the girls across the
aisle, which if published in book form
would cause the average "letters of
courtship and marriage book to be-
come naus-ating drug in the literary
market. The sweet girl teacher grab
bed me by the coat collar and shook
me until my head looked like seven
teen heads to the rest of the scholars
and / could see the air full of stars
and stripes and the signs of the zodiac.
There now, young man. perhaps you
will behave after this!' she gasped,
breathless. with her exertion, but 1
only smole a sickly smile as retired
to my desk, and when she turned
her head I fixed perpendicular
slate pencil in the chair of the
teachers pet" so as to impale
him when he sat down after reciting.
When his wild shrek arose on the
oWAAS CbuA AO Ola AAcIOAJ up dA0
down the aisle with the slate pencil
sticking to his polonaise. was willing
to call things square, but the teacher
wasn't. She came over and laid her
girlish, lily white hand on my ear, in
a manner that caused me to hear the
roar of Niagara Falls distinctly.
There also seemed to be more or less
heavy cannonading taking place on
the rim of my auricular organ. When
I recovered consciousness I decided to
offer remonstrance to any further
demonstrations of this nature on her
part. 1 ''passed" at the end of the
term. Notwithstanding her efforts to
teach me nine different studies in al
most as many minutes, and was hand
ed over to muscular young lady. who
in my hearing, to take the
out of me via the rapid trans
II route. She pulled the girls ears so
they hung down on their shoulders,
and slapped the boys out of their seats
with a single graceful swipe of
the hand. One day she caught me
studying my geography lesson out of
yellow-covered book entitled 'Rattle-
snake Mike, or the mystery of the
Blood Sausage" She ran foot-race
with me around the room, then laid
both hands upon my shoulders and at
tempted to wave me about in the air,
but the back of the chair to which I
chung came out and we both fell back
upon our shoulder blades while an
angular pair of youthful legs together
with a brilliant display of striped
stockings rose high in the air. We
were disentangled with some difficulty
and while the teacher was looking for
her back hair, went home with fly
in0 cnlOrS and orders not tn ro+,rr