Miss Melon taught us a song with gestures – “I Want to Be an Angel.” We had a Christmas tree. Each of us children took a dime; then we got a present from the tree. Mine was a woolly lamb about four or five inches high, including the little platform on wheels on which it stood.
My next school was the Cromer – later converted into the Episcopal Church. It was in a row of houses that are now gone. The Crescent Hotel was not yet built. At the first turn on Prospect Street was the Christian Church. The Cromer had two rooms. The older pupils were in the back room with Miss Helen Putnam for teacher. We little folks were in the room next to the street with Miss Melon for our teacher. There might have been two terms there, for before we left I was studying the Third Reader. We also had spelling books and arithmetics – Ray’s Primary Arithmetic. Of course, as usual, we had our slates. My sister Ida was old enough now to go to school. Minnie was in the other room.
There must have been a very large enrollment. We sat on homemade wooden benches without desks; long benches that reached across the room. There were desks in the next room. Let no one speak disparagingly of our school in those days. I refrained from saying much about Miss Melon in describing our school on East Mountain. This is the best place to give an account of her teaching. Laura Melon was a teacher of training and experience, who had come from the St. Louis Public Schools. She came, as many teachers in those days came, for a sojourn in what was then a very new and popular resort for health and sight-seeing; a summer resort for those from the South, a winter resort for those from the North.
Talk of progressive education! Miss Melon taught us many of the things that are being stressed by modern educators. She had an abacus, and taught number combinations by pushing about, with a little pointer, colored beads on wires. We knew the primary colors and what combinations formed the secondary colors; she used colored crayons to show the results of marking one over another. I have never forgotten the seven prismatic colors in their proper order. She had a prism and showed its effect on sunlight.
We learned from her where are the Boston Mountains, the meaning of the word “delta” and that there is a delta at the mouth of the White River, that it joins the Arkansas River with one mouth, the Mississippi with the other. I have seen children in high school who did not know the meaning of the word “opaque;” Miss Laura Melon’s pupils knew.
She had some methods that would be condemned by modern educators; but I shall always give her credit for developing my reasoning powers. We had to give solutions for our little problems – reasoning from many to one and from one to many. I believe we were really using syllogisms; if this is true and that is true, this other thing is also true. Not a “since” or a “hence” or a “therefore” could we omit. We hated these lessons, of course; but many a time since, that formula has helped me solve difficult problems; it helped me to understand division of fractions.
At the Cromer School there were three delightful sources of play. At that time, on the site where Dr. Johnson’s new house was built, there was on old frame building two stories high, with a plain roof and no ells or leantos to cause grooves in the roof; it was a plain roof, an ideal place for playing “ante over.” Should the ball strike the roof there was nothing to stop it from rolling off. The house was long enough for all the pupils of the school to play, and narrow enough that the ball could be tossed over. Nobody objected to our playing there. The older children did not object to the youngest joining in the sport. I suspect the biggest boys oftenest caught and tossed the ball; but it was fun to scamper around the end of the building when someone on either team caught the ball and led his “side” around to catch as many as possible of the opponents.