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Frontier Humor in Verse, Prose and Picture

Chapter 26: VISITING A SCHOOL.
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About This Book

A lively assortment of comic verses, short prose pieces, and illustrated vignettes that lampoon everyday life on the frontier and in small towns. Individual items portray bungled schemes, animal mishaps, social embarrassments, and civic or courtroom absurdities presented with ironic twists. Many pieces are brief rhymes or tall tales while others develop longer humorous narratives, and most are paired with spirited drawings that amplify physical gags and visual punch lines. The overall tone is playful and satirical, aiming to amuse by exposing human foibles through slapstick situations and witty observation.

VISITING A SCHOOL.

Accepting an invitation extended by the principal of an uptown school, I visited that institution to-day. The masses of young humanity a person finds in these temples of instruction is something amazingly impressive. Eight or nine hundred scholars are attending the one school on which I bestowed my attentions to-day.

HEAD OF HIS CLASS.

FOOT OF HER CLASS.

This article must be embellished with a faithful sketch of the boy who stood at the head of his class. How he felt at that moment, I couldn’t say, never having any experience in the position myself. He looked happy and confident, however, and snapped eagerly at the words as they fell from the teacher’s lips, much as a hungry dog does at the crumbs falling from a table. But my sympathies were decidedly with the little contortionist who stood mournfully at the foot of her class. I knew how that was myself. I had been “yar,” and I regretted I wasn’t a ventriloquist, that I might from afar whisper in her ear, and assist her over some clogging syllables. If she could have gone into the yard, where I noticed a scholar of the senior class throwing herself in a delirium of joy, brought about by a skipping-rope, she would probably have acquitted herself in a creditable manner, and won the praise of all, for however inferior a person may be to another in some matters, when they can choose their game they often reverse the order, and peradventure the poor stammering scholar could have skipped the skirts off those jogging ahead of her in the common speller.