Page:History of Barrington, Rhode Island (Bicknell).djvu/201

SCHOOL-HOUSES. 155 Lose not your books, inkhorns or pens, Nor girdle, garters, hat or band. Let shoes be tjed, pin shirt-band close, Keep well your hands at any hand. If broken hosed or shoed you go, Or slovenly in your arraj', Without a girdle or intrust, Then 3'ou and I must have a fray." Several more verses added to the duties and increased the perils of a scholar's life in that early day. Of the early school-houses, built by the proprietors of the town, very little can be said to commend their comforts or even their conveniences. Rudely built, located near the centre of the district, on the triangle where three ways parted, or on the angle formed by two roads ; furnished with long wooden benches and desks; heated from open fireplaces at the end of the room opposite the door, so far as it could be said to have been heated at all ; the wood for fuel fur- nished by the patrons of the school, in lieu of money for the support of the school; the fires built by the larger boys, and the house swept and otherwise kept clean by the larger girls ; — these were some of the conditions of that early school life of our ancestors two centuries ago. In fact, matters had but little altered in the early part of this century for Edward Everett in an address at Faneuil Hall, Boston, in 1855, speaks thus of the " old school house " of 1804. " It contained but one room heated in the winter by an iron stove, which sent up a funnel into a curious brick chimney, built down from the roof, in the middle of the room, to within seven or eight feet of the floor, being like Mahomet's coffin, held in the air to the roof by bars of iron. The boys had to take their turns, in winter, in coming early to the school-house, to open it, to make a fire sometimes of wet logs and a very inadequate supply of other combustibles, to sweep out the room, and, if need be, to shovel a path through the snow to the street. These were not very fascinating duties for an urchin of ten or eleven ; but we lived through