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Finally we must consider what pleasantness of teaching there is in books, how easy, how secret! How safely we lay bare the poverty of human ignorance to books without feeling any shame! They are masters who instruct us without rod or ferule, without angry words, without clothes or money.
A fastidious sense of the obligations of class served him for a soul and the thing he was about to do could not be justified even in his loose code of ethics. He examined the ferule of his Malacca cane nervously. "I've come to you, Mr. Durand, about about a fellow called Lindsay." The bulbous eyes of the other narrowed. He distrusted on principle all kid gloves.
"Thee may hold out your hands now, and I shall ferule thee the whole school," was the stern remark of the young teacher, as she took off her spectacles to wipe the holes. "Why, we haven't been doing anything," said Ruthie, affecting to cry. "No, I know it; but thee'd ought to have been doing something; thee'd ought to have studied thy lessons."
For such offenders, if any such there be, a rod of birch is hanging over the fire-place, and a heavy ferule lies on the master’s desk. And now school is begun. What a murmur of multitudinous tongues, like the whispering leaves of a wind-stirred oak, as the scholars con over their various tasks! Buz, buz, buz!
This ferule was shaped much like the stick with which she stirred her hasty pudding for dinner, I thought it was the same, and I found myself caught in a whirlwind of family laughter by reporting at home that "Aunt Hannah punished the scholars with the pudding-stick."
Under these conditions a close application at his desk in the village school was an unheard-of consequence; and, having repeatedly smarted under the schoolmaster's ferule, not to mention his good mother's switches plucked from the big lilac bush by her door, he decided to run away to the great harbor, and ship upon some vessel bound for a foreign land. This he did.
But, before long, conflicts in the outside world disturbed our young teacher. The multiplication table and spelling book no longer enchained her thoughts; larger questions began to fill her mind. About the year 1850 Susan B. Anthony hid her ferule away. Temperance, anti-slavery, woman suffrage, three pregnant questions, presented themselves, demanding her consideration.
The entire operation would probably take about three or four weeks with the poor tools at their disposal. The builder selects snow of the proper consistency by sounding a drift with a cane, made for the purpose, of reindeer horn, straightened by steaming, and worked down until about half an inch in diameter, with a ferule of walrus tusk or the tooth of a bear on the bottom.
Horace celebrates his old schoolmaster as a "man of many blows," and another distinguished pupil of this teacher, the Busby or Keate of antiquity, has specified the weapons which he employed, the ferule and the thong. The thong is the familiar "tawse" of schools north of the Border.
Certainly he could not have dreamed that within twenty-four hours he would be sitting in one of them with her, by her appointment, at her request. He thrilled with excitement with delicious anxieties. "Janet told you I was a widow," Hilda began, gazing at the ferule of her umbrella, which gleamed on the ground. "Yes." Again she was surprising him.
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