Henry Ward Beecher certainly owed a debt of gratitude to his teacher in mathematics, says an exchange, not only for the knowledge acquired through his tuition, but for lessons tending to produce strength of character. He tells this story to illustrate the teacher’s method:— I was sent to the blackboard, and went, uncertain, soft, full of whimpering. “That lesson must be learned,” said the teacher in a very quiet tone, but with terrible intensity. All explanations and excuses he trod under foot with utter scornfulness. “I want that problem; I don’t want any reasons why I don’t get it,” he would say. “I did study it two hours.” “That’s nothing to me. I want the lesson. You need not study it at all, or you may study it ten hours, just suit yourself. I want the lesson.” “It was tough for a green boy,” says Beecher, “but it seasoned me. In less than a month I had the most intense sense of intellectual independence and courage to defend my recitations. His cold and calm voice would fall upon me in the midst of a demonstration, ‘No!’ “I hesitated, and then went back to the beginning, and on reaching the same spot again, ‘No!’ uttered with the tone of conviction, barred my progress. “‘The next,’ and I sat down in red confusion. “‘He, too, was stopped with ‘No!’ but went right on, finished, and sat down, and was rewarded with, ‘Very well.’ “‘Why,’ whimpered I, ‘I recited just as well as he did, and you said ‘No!’” “‘Why don’t you say, Yes! and stick to it? It is not enough to know your lesson. You must know that you know it. You have learned nothing till you are sure. If all the world says, No! your business is to say Yes, and prove it.’”