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some of mine
IN the matter of general culture and attainments, we youngsters stood on pretty level
ground. True, it was always happening that one of us would be singled out at any
moment, freakishly, and without regard to his own preferences, to wrestle with the
inflections of some idiotic language long rightly dead; while another, from some
fancied artistic tendency which always failed to justify itself, might be told off
without warning to hammer out scales and exercises, and to bedew the senseless keys
with tears of weariness or of revolt. But in subjects common to either sex, and held
to be
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necessary even for him whose ambition soared no higher than to crack a whip in a
circus-ring -- in geography, for instance, arithmetic, or the weary doings of kings
and queens -- each would have scorned to excel. And, indeed, whatever our individual
gifts, a general dogged determination to shirk and to evade kept us all at much the
same dead level, -- a level of ignorance tempered by insubordination.
Fortunately there existed a wide range of subjects, of healthier tone than those
already enumerated, in which we were free to choose for ourselves, and which we would
have scorned to consider education; and in these we freely followed each his own
particular line, often attaining an amount of special knowledge which struck our
ignorant elders as simply uncanny.
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