The Newspaper as an Educator

To an unæses the tic phase of my aunt ’s passion for cleanliness, I frankly attribute my present reputation for having an appalling store of useless knowledge. It was her custom to shroud those household articles that would not be the better for daily soap and water, in layers of newspaper. Newspapers protected the section of tinted wall behind the kitchen sink; newspapers protected the splasher that protected the wall behind my washstand. And it was my happy custom to forget the unpleasantness of the duties I was forced to perform in both spots by losing myself in the fascinating columns hung so conveniently before my eyes. Oft the stale journals told of nothing but the births, marriages, and other misfortunes of the world that lay within my farthest milestone. But I can remember, too, a learned article — the Dial’s, I think — on the Napoleonic revival, that hung before my gaze for a week. I can say it now — word for word — to the first row of tacks that held it in place. I had washed the dishes, every meal, every day, with my eyes glued on it; and I read it through each washing time. The denominational weekly that kept the oilcloth covering of the kitchen table from stain gave me a biased but consistent view of church history. The upper and lower shelves of the range set forth, respectively, for two weeks, the “Tendency of Modern Philosophy” and the “Cause of the Democratic Disintegration.”

When, later, by reason of my exceeding plainness of feature, I was sent to college to acquire that wisdom that is mistakenly supposed to atone for lack of beauty, my wasteful habit stood me well. For a month I had been tonguetied in the Latin class of a professor who made every fresh occasion of our ignorance on any topic the subject of a philippic against the home, school, and state. When, on a day, this terrible one broke into a lesson with a sneering question as to recent investigations on the sites of some ancient towns that inconsiderately turned up in the notes, I rose to a height, and delivered a review of the work of Flinders Petrie. The class was open-mouthed, and the professor pop-eyed with wonder. They had not seen me hang over the dishpan with Flinders neatly pinned round the soap-box that fronted my nose. That was but the first time. Equally startled was the botany instructor when I gave some expert information on the variations of the orchid, gathered from my bureau cover. In a literature class, with facts gleaned from the place on the cellar wall where the coalman might put his hand, I delivered an address on the Pre-Raphaelite movement, as shown in the works of Rossetti. The climax of my manifestations of endless knowledge came when I saved an awful dinner-table by conversing with a reformed missionary on the tribal ceremonies of some inner African races. He wondered even while he listened. I had not been sent to dust the leg of a paper-swathed piano for nothing. In spite of my mediocre lessons I became in the course of time a by-word and a Phi Beta Kappa, and — but I hate to write the word. For there are days when I fear that I shall never have use for the facts I have gleaned from the scratchable back of my mahogany chair, on “How to Plan the Trousseau.”And to add to the store of my useless information, a gilt-framed ancestor disappeared for the summer behind a sheet that explains with distracting pictures, “ What Baby Needs. ”