Adventures in Contentment

"For the good of bachelors as well as other people?" the Scotch Preacher will press it home. "Certainly, of course." And when the final issue comes, after full discussion, after he has tried to lop off a few yards of blackboard or order cheaper desks or dispense with the clothes-closet, he votes for the addition with the rest of us. It is simply amazing to see how much grows out of these discussions--how much of that social sympathy and understanding which is the very tap-root of democracy. It's cheaper to put up a miserable shack of an addition. Why not do it? So we discuss architecture--blindly, it is true; we don't know the books on the subject--but we grope for the big true things, and by our own discussion we educate ourselves to know why a good building is better than a bad one. Heating and ventilation in their relation to health, the use of "fad studies"--how I have heard those things discussed! How Dr. North, who has now left us forever, shone in those meetings, and Charles Baxter and the Scotch Preacher--broad men, every one--how they have explained and argued, with what patience have they brought into that small schoolhouse, lighted by Charles Baxter's lamp, the grandest conceptions of human society--not in the big words of the books, but in the simple, concrete language of our common life. "Why teach physiology?" What a talk Dr. North once gave us on that! "Why pay a teacher $40 a month when one can be had for $30?"