country communities by the custom of "Saying the Catechism" yearly in church. Three summer Sundays were set apart for the purpose, and a portion was recited each Sunday at the close of the afternoon service. It was a momentous occasion, and when the parson announced from the pulpit that, "Sabbath after next, the first division of the Catechism will be recited here," a thrill of excitement ran through the congregation. In this recitation all the children between eight and fifteen years took part. There were fortnight intervals between the three Sundays to allow the children to perfect their memory of the next lot of questions. They must know every answer, and old primers were looked up, new ones bought, and the young folk got to work in earnest. When the first of the great days came, and the other exercises of the day were concluded, the children, arrayed in their "Sabba'day clothes," gathered in two long lines in the broad aisle, the boys on one side, the girls on the other. The lines began near the deacon's seat under the brow of the pulpit, and very likely extended the full length of the broad. aisle and around into the aisles at the rear. Parents and relatives crowded the pews and galleries, all watching the scene with solemn interest - an interest that was tinged on the part of the mothers with anxiety lest their children should not acquit themselves with credit. The minister, standing in the pulpit, gave out the questions. Each child, in order, stepped forth into mid-aisle, faced the pulpit, made his manners, an swered the questions put to him, and stepped back. To be "told "—that is, to be prompted or corrected by the minister was a dire disgrace, and brought one's ability and scholarship into ill repute. Many were the knees that smote together, and many were the beating hearts and shaky voices among the little people in those two conspicuous lines. When the second division of the Catechism was recited, the smaller children had dropped out, and, on the third Sunday, reserved for the long and knotty answers in the last portion of the Catechism, only a meagre squad of the oldest children lined up in front of the pulpit. The Catechism was treated scarcely less seriously in the schools than it was in the churches, and the teachers drilled their pupils in it as thoroughly as they did in spelling or any other lesson. With the primer so constantly used in church, school, and home, the people could not help but be saturated with its doctrines, and no book save the Bible did more to form New England character. In short, this humble little primer was a chief tool for making sure that the children, or, as Jonathan Edwards called them, "young vipers and infinitely more hateful than vipers to God," should grow up into sober and Christian men and women. IV THE DISTRICT SCHOOLS HE years after the Revolution, till about T 1840, form the most picturesque period in our educational history. This was preeminently the period of the district school; and while I refer especially, in what follows, to the experiences of Massachusetts, these experiences did not differ essentially from those of the states neighboring. At first the prevailing poverty and rusticity and loose government made it difficult to maintain any school organization that was at all adequate. Many communities had no schoolhouse until the beginning of the nineteenth century, but hired a room in some dwelling and furnished it with desks and benches. In colonial times, either the town in its meetings chose the master, fixed his salary, and determined the conditions on which pupils were admitted, or else this business was turned over to the selectmen. Now, however, the control of school affairs in each division of the town was delegated to a "prudential committeeman" elected by the people of his own district. The amount of money to be raised for school support was still determined by the town and was assessed with the other taxes, but after its distri |