@ohn Pounds’ SHehool.

OHN POUNDS was born at Portsmouth in the year 1766, and
as he grew up his parents, who were in humble circumstances,
apprenticed him to a shipwright. Whilst working in the dock-
yard he met with an accident; one of his thighs was broken, he
was rendered a cripple for life and had to seek another means
ems of subsistence. He took to mending shoes, and lived ina
ener boarded house in St. Mary’s street in his native town.

Being of a gentle and humane disposition, he was fond of animals, and
kept a number of tame birds in his stall, and his good nature moved him to
take charge of a child belonging to his brother, who had a numerous family.
This poor child was acripple, his feet overlapping each other, but the ingenious
cobbler contrived an apparatus of old shoes and straps, by means of which the
boy’s feet were kept in their right position and he was soon cured. The kind-
hearted John next taught him to read, and, thinking that his little nephew would
learn better with companions, he asked a neighbor to send him his children to
be taught. Others followed, and soon the wooden booth, which was eighteen
feet long by six in width, was crowded to overflowing. His teaching was all
gratuitous, and he delighted in reclaiming and teaching ‘“‘the little blackguards,”
as he called them. He sought out the boa urchins on the quays of the town,
and bribed them with a ete apple to come to his school.

He managed to procure some fragments of old school-books, and from
these and some old hand-bills he taught the children to read, whilst with slate
and pencil they learned writing and arithmetic. His method of instruction was
by means of questions. Seated with his lapstone on his knee in the midst of
his mob of little pupils, he would go on with his work, whilst asking them the
names of different objects and then making them spell them. With the younger
ones he was very playful. He would touch a little one’s ear and say: ‘What's
this?” And when the child replied: “Ear,” he would say: ‘“Spellit.” Then,
pinching it gently, he would say: “What doI do?” “Pinch.” ‘Then spell
that,” said he. And so on with the hand or foot.

As the children grew older he adopted a stricter discipline with them, but
they all loved him; and many hundreds of persons, filling useful positions in
life, owed all the education they ever received to the poor cobbler, whose sole
reward was the joy he felt in doing good to others, and in the visit, now and
then, of some brave soldier or sailor, grown out of all remembrance, who came
to shake hands with their kind old teacher. Though he was favorably noticed