Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 6.djvu/109

 DAVID CROSBY.

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��although, several years ago, it seemed that he was about to deprive me of the ability to pursue my calling, still he was merciful, and has enabled me to con- tinue it ior the past four years with the very imperfect sight of one eye only. And although I pursue my daily rou- tine with embarrassment, still I desire to be very thankful that I can pursue it at all. Many years ago I did hope to teach fifty consecutive years. This term I entered on my fifty -fourth. Ought I not to be very very thankful?"

He continued at the head of his school between one and two years longer, after which he taught classes at his home until within a few weeks of his death.

Of course his first teaching was in the district school. While in college, beside a school during each winter vacation, then of fourteen weeks, he managed to keep along with his class and be occupied in academical teach- ing several terms. He taught at New- port one or more terms before his grad- uation, and a year and a half imme- diately following it. He then accepted an invitation to be one of a corps of teachers in the academy at '"Nashua Village." His associates were Gard- ner S. Brown, Miss Rhoda Spalding, Miss Henrietta Thatcher, Miss Lou- iza S. Hunton, and several "assistant pupils." He entered on his duties April i, 1835. The academy was then in a very nourishing condition. In the term following the summer vacation, the attendance was largely increased. But before it ended, a spark of discord, thoughtlessly dropped, occasioned an explosion which scattered teachers and pupils and left the academy pros- trate.

Mr. Crosby at once received and accepted an offer of a ''professorship" in the New Hampton Institute. But in the spring of 1836, the discerning citizens of Nashua, knowing that neither he nor Miss Hunton had dropped or fanned the fatal spark, of- fered both such inducements that they returned and took charge, the one of the male, and the other of the female

��department. At the close of the first term they were united in marriage. She continued to be his efficient helper in teaching for some years, and the light of his very happy home while he lived ; and he to teach without in- terregnum, first in the old academy, and then in the Nashua Literary In- stitute, until his life-work was finished.

What were his special excellencies as a teacher?

First. He loved teaching. It was not to him a make-shift, a mere tem- porary pontoon bridge to save him from drowning while crossing over to his chosen vocation. But as soon as he had, by a hard struggle, worked his way up to the point of gaining a passport into the teacher's desk, he was in his chosen vocation. And had he been driven out, and an angel sta- tioned at the gate of his paradise with a flaming sword turning every way, he would have had to be on the alert to keep him from getting in again. While occupied in teaching he was at his center of attraction, where all the lines of his tastes, aspirations, and ambitions met and terminated.

Second. He not only loved to teach, but he loved his pupils. In in- terest and affection for them, he adopted them as his children (he had no other), and in the spirit of a wise Christian father he exhausted his skill in endeavoring to develop and dis- cipline all their faculties of mind and heart for the highest usefulness, honor, and happiness that the best improve- ment and right use of the talents given them would admit of. Pupils who had been under his tuition for any length of time he held in memory as well as affection, with singular tenacity. In his last letter to one of his first stu- dents at Nashua, he says of five from the same family — looking back through all the mutations of more than forty years — "'all their countenances are dis- tinctly portrayed on my chamber of imagery, so that I can recall them as readily and as clearly as those of my most intimate friends." He had a most hearty fellow-feeling for students

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