one as far as I could send it, and the child that first shouted
the reign it fell in got the apple.
The children were encouraged to stop locating things as
being “over by the arbor,” or “in the oak parlor,” or “up at the
stone steps,” and say instead that the things were in Stephen, or
in the Commonwealth, or in George III. They got the habit
without trouble. To have the long road mapped out with such
exactness was a great boon for me, for I had the habit of leaving
books and other articles lying around everywhere, and had not
previously been able to definitely name the place, and so had
often been obliged to go to fetch them myself, to save time and
failure; but now I could name the reign I left them in, and send
the children.
Next I thought I would measure off the French reigns, and
peg them alongside the English ones, so that we could always have
contemporaneous French history under our eyes as we went our
English rounds. We pegged them down to the Hundred Years’ War,
then threw the idea aside, I do not now remember why. After that
we made the English pegs fence in European and American history
as well as English, and that answered very well. English and
alien poets, statesmen, artists, heroes, battles, plagues,
cataclysms, revolutions–we shoveled them all into the English
fences according to their dates. Do you understand? We gave
Washington’s birth to George II.’s pegs and his death to George
III.’s; George II. got the Lisbon earthquake and George III. the
Declaration of Independence. Goethe, Shakespeare, Napoleon,
Savonarola, Joan of Arc, the French Revolution, the Edict of
Nantes, Clive, Wellington, Waterloo, Plassey, Patay, Cowpens,
Saratoga, the Battle of the Boyne, the invention of the
logarithms, the microscope, the steam-engine, the telegraph–
anything and everything all over the world–we dumped it all
in among the English pegs according to it date and regardless
of its nationality.
If the road-pegging scheme had not succeeded I should have
lodged the kings in the children’s heads by means of pictures–
that is, I should have tried. It might have failed, for the
pictures could only be effective WHEN MADE BY THE PUPIL; not the
master, for it is the work put upon the drawing that makes the
drawing stay in the memory, and my children were too little to make
drawings at that time. And, besides, they had no talent for art,
which is strange, for in other ways they are like me.
But I will develop the picture plan now, hoping that you will
be able to use it. It will come good for indoors when the
weather is bad and one cannot go outside and peg a road. Let us
imagine that the kings are a procession, and that they have come
out of the Ark and down Ararat for exercise and are now starting
back again up the zigzag road. This will bring several of them
into view at once, and each zigzag will represent the length of
a king’s reign.
And so on. You will have plenty of space, for by my project
you will use the parlor wall. You do not mark on the wall; that
would cause trouble. You only attach bits of paper to it with
pins or thumb-tacks. These will leave no mark.
Take your pen now, and twenty-one pieces of white paper,
each two inches square, and we will do the twenty-one years of
the Conqueror’s reign. On each square draw a picture of a whale
and write the dates and term of service. We choose the whale for
several reasons: its name and William’s begin with the same
letter; it is the biggest fish that swims, and William is the
most conspicuous figure in English history in the way of a
landmark; finally, a whale is about the easiest thing to draw.
By the time you have drawn twenty-one wales and written “William
I.–1066-1087–twenty-one years” twenty-one times, those details
will be your property; you cannot dislodge them from your memory
with anything but dynamite. I will make a sample for you to copy:
(Fig. 3).
I have got his chin up too high, but that is no matter; he
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