Page:Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs (Volume One).djvu/54

Rh When my uncle died at the age of about eighty-five years, the common was unoccupied, and it had the appearance that property takes on when the owner is intemperate or absent, or when heirs cannot agree to a division. The settlement of my uncle’s estate was put into the hands of Mr. Ephraim Graham, whose brother had married my uncle’s eldest daughter. My uncle’s children were scattered, and apparently they inherited their father’s indifference to property. Graham was unable to finish any business, and after ten or more years he died, leaving the estate unsettled. Finally, the ladies of the village took possession of the common, removed the rubbish, leveled the ground, and made the spot an agreeable feature of the town.

Of the teachers of the village school there are several that I remember with gratitude, and I cannot but think that some of them were very good teachers. My first teacher was Martha Putnam, afterwards Mrs. Nathaniel F. Cunningham. Of her as a teacher I can recall nothing. Her father, Major Daniel Putnam, was the principal trader in the village. For the time and place his accumulations were very large. Nancy Stearns, afterwards Mrs. Benjamin Snow, was the teacher of the summer school for many years. But beyond comparison Cyrus Kilburn was the best teacher of the town, and a person who would have ranked high among teachers at any period in the history of the State. He was not a learned man in a large sense, but his habit was to investigate the subjects within his scope, with great thoroughness. Grammar was his favorite study, and he devised a system of analysis in parsing quite in advance of the time. He had the faculty of putting questions and of changing them to meet the capacities of the pupils. He compelled thinking. I attended the winter school about ten terms, and of these not less than six terms were taught by Mr. Kilburn.

In later years we had Colburn’s Sequel as the arithmetic.