In this my Aunt Jerusha was allowed a greater authority than in the matter of my diet, and she early made up her mind that the great weakness of the educational system of the day was the tendency of the teachers in our schools to cram the minds of the young.
"There is no hurry in days like these when people live to be eight or nine hundred years old," she observed to my mother.

"There is not very much to be learned as yet.

Science is in its infancy, very little history has been made, and as for Latin and Greek, it is entirely unnecessary for Methy to study those languages, because as yet, nobody speaks them, and with the possible exception of that tramp poet, Homer, who passed through here last week on his way West, nobody is using it in literature.

Teach him the three Rs and all will be well.

Taking the alphabet first and learning one letter a year for twenty-six years he will be able to read and write as early in life as he ought to.