month, and then resolved to abolish the whole business by a general revolt. Big and little, we agreed to stand by each other, break up the new exercise and get back to the old order of things, the hurdle races in mental arithmetic and the geographical chants which we could run and intone together.

Was I a mutineer? Well, say, son, your pa was a constitutional conspirator. He was in the color guard. You see, the first boy called on for a declamation was to announce the strike, and as my name stood very high-in the alphabetical roll of pupils-I had an excellent chance of leading the assaulting column, a distinction for which I was not at all ambitious, being a stripling of tender years, ruddy countenance and sensitive feelings. However, I was stiffened to my soul, girded on my armor by slipping an atlas back under my jacket, and was ready for the fray, feeling a little terrified shiver of delight as I thought that the first lick Mr. Hinman gave me would make him think he had broken my back.

The hour of speaking pieces, an hour big with fate, arrived on time. A boy named Aby Abbot was called up ahead of me, but he happened to be one of the presidential aspirants (he was mate on an Illinois steamboat, stern-wheeler, at that, the last I knew of him) and, of course, he flunked and said his piece— a sadly prophetic selection-"Mr. President, it is natural for men to indulge in the illusions of hope." We made such suggestive and threatening gestures at him, however, when Mr. Hinman was not looking, that he forgot half his "piece", broke down and cried. He also cried after school, a little more bitterly and with far better reason.

Then, after an awful pause, in which the conspirators could hear the beating of each other's hearts, my name was called.

I sat still at my desk and said:

"I ain't going to speak no piece."

Mr. Hinman looked greatly surprised and asked:

"Why not, Robert?"

"Because there ain't going to be any more speaking pieces." The teacher's eyes grew round and big as he inquired: "Who says there will not?"

I said, in slightly firmer tones, as I realized that the moment had come for dragging the rest of the rebels into court:

"All of us boys."

But Mr. Hinman smiled and said quietly that he guessed there would be a "little more speaking before the close of the season". Then, laying his hand on my shoulder with most punctilious but chilling courtesy, he invited me to the rostrum. The "rostrum" was twenty-five feet distant, but I arrived there on schedule time and only touched my feet to the floor. twice on the way.

And then and there under Mr. Hinman's judicious coaching before the assembled school, and with feelings, nay, emotions which I now shudder to recall, I did my first "song and dance". Many times before had I stepped off a sole-cachuca to the staccato pleading of a fragment of slate frame, upon which my tutor was a gifted performer, but never until that day did I accompany myself with words. Boy-like I had chosen for my piece a poem sweetly expressive of those peaceful virtues which I most heartily despised. So that my performance at the inauguration of the strike as Mr. Hinman conducted the overture, ran something like this:

"Oh, not for me (whack) is the rolling (whack) drum,

Or the (whack) (whack) trumpet's wild (whack) appeal (whack);

Or the cry (swish, whack) of (boo-hoo-hoo) war when (whack) foe is coming (ouch)

Or the (ow-wow) brightly (whack) flashing (whack, whack) steel (wah-hoo, wah-hoo)."

Thus I illustrated the seven stanzas of this beautiful poem. I really had selected it to please my mother, whom I had invited to be present when I supposed I would deliver it. But the fact that she attended a missionary meeting at the Baptist church that afternoon made me a friend of missions forever. Suffice it to say, then, that my pantomime kept pace and time with Mr. Hinman's system of punctuation until the last line was sobbed and I went to my seat in a mist of tears and sat down gingerly and sideways, only wondering why an inscrutable Providence had given to the rugged rhinoceros the hide which in the eternal fitness of things had plainly been prepared for the schoolboy.

But I quickly forgot my own sorrow and dried my tears with laughter in the enjoyment of the subsequent acts of the

opera. As the chorus developed and the plot and action, Mr. Hinman, who had been somewhat gentle with me, dealt firmly with the larger boy who followed, and there was a scene of revelry for the next twenty minutes. The old man shook Bill Morrison until his teeth rattled so you couldn't hear him cry. He hit Mickey McCann, the tough boy from the lower prairie, and Mickey ran out and lay down in the snow to cool off. He hit Jake Bailey across the legs with a slate frame and it hurt so that Jake couldn't howl-he just opened his mouth wide, held up his hands, gasped and forgot his own name. He pushed Bill Haskell into a seat and the bench broke.

He ran across the room and reached out for Lem Harkins, and Lem had a fit before the old man touched him. He shook Dan Stevenson for two minutes and when he let him go Dan walked around his own desk five times before he could find it and then he couldn't sit down without holding on. He whipped the two Knowltons with a skate strap in each hand at the same time, and the Greenwood family all at once with a girl's skipping rope, and they raised such a united cry and wail that the clock stopped.

He took a twist in Bill Rodecker's front hair, and Bill slept with his eyes open for a week. He kept the atmosphere of that school room full of dust and splinters and lint, weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth until he reached the end of the alphabet and all hearts ached and wearied of the inhuman strife and wicked contentions. Then he stood up before us a sickening tangle of slate frames, straps, ebony ferule and skipping rope, a smile on his kind face, and asked in clear triumphant tones:

"Who says there isn't going to be any more speaking pieces?"

And every last boy in that school sprang to his feet. Standing there as one human being with one great mouth, we shrieked in concerted anguish:

"Nobody don't!"

And your pa, my son, who led that strike, has been "speaking pieces" ever since.

On the occasion of the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Peoria High School in 1906,

his niece, Ellen Muir, read a letter from Mr. Burdette, which tells the story of his high school days there:

1861 was a class composed exclusively of "stars". There was too much talent to play in one combination-the house wouldn't hold the people. So Robert Gregg and Sewell Ford were graduated in the spring, and at Christmas Mary Luccock, John Chalmers and I stepped over the threshold. I stood at the foot of the class, but by persuasion mingled with guile, I induced my colleagues to adopt for our class motto, "Ex pede Herculem", and once more I sat in the red cart close to the driver, with the unplugged melons sowed behind us in appetizing rows, up to the load line. My "commencement essay foreshadowed my subsequent career as a statesman. It was "The Press and the Ballot Box". I have preserved that rather remarkable state paper. Would you like to see it? For a hundred thousand dollars you may. I sometimes read it myself. It mitigates the horror of approaching death. Nothing, my children, is ever written in vain, except a protest against the unfair assessment of taxes on your own property.

When the duplex class of '61 went out, I ceased to be an actor, factor or malefactor in the drama of the Peoria High School. My school days were ended, but my education had just begun. Because there has never been any school since that day to divide my affection and loyalty, my love for the old school has been constant, deepening in its loyalty and tenderness as the years multiply between today and the yesterdays at school. The days and the boys and the girls that were and are "dear as the ruddy drops that warm my heart".

I send my greeting to the school of yesterday and todayI send to the graduates the love of an Old Boy. To think that more than forty years ago I knew nearly as much as the youngest and most omniscient of you. Come up into the bigger and higher school where the desks are more comfortable, the lessons are harder, the hours longer, the teachers more pitilessly exacting, where the study is more of a joy and the rewards are higher and more justly bestowed.

Come right up into the cart and sit beside your Uncle Robert. Then, whenever you're hungry, you may cut a nice, ripe, juicy melon. The cart's full of 'em.

Er-just before I close. About the melons. Don't want to mislead you. There are plenty of melons. In fact, the whole world is one big melon patch. And it is true that some carts are empty and some are full of melons. But, one little pointer, my children. You've got to pick your own melons and load 'em into the cart yourself. Then you're sure they are there. God bless every boy and girl of you.

In a newspaper letter touching revived memories of all his school days, he says:

I was a maverick when I started to school, but successive dynasties of instruction put the proper brand all over me before I was finally broken to the yoke and plow. I wasn't professedly a believer in corporal punishment, but I was better than most professors and nominal believers-I practiced the doctrine right along; at least, I lived up to it; it did me good and does me good unto this day. It makes a great many things beautifully clear to me. "Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous," says the great apostle, "but grievous." I don't need any commentary on that passage. I am a seminary exegete on that part of the Epistle.

But I can truly say that all my chastisements at school are at this day among my most joyous memories. I laugh every time I think of one. Not so much about the whipping, as over the recollection of the jolly good time I had earning it. I was as recklessly happy as a man who is acquiring the gout for his grandsons.

But all that went in the curriculum; my school days were happy, seriously speaking. I was a happy boy; all the year round I was happy. And in the loyal, tender, loving niches of my heart I have builded the fairest shrines my affection can fashion, wherein I have placed the images of the saints who were my school teachers. Some of them are living; some are dead; all are old and gray. But there, where I alone can see them, they are all living; they are all young, with the morning light of love and enthusiasm shining in their faces. Memory makes them beautiful, and the years cluster their brows like stars.

Coincident with the "barefoot days" and the school days was an influence which was to act upon one of the