Mother and lover of men. . . .
-- Swinburne.

MY FATHER was Chairman of the Democratic State Central
Committee but the Territorial Delegate to Congress -- old Eat-
a-Mule Callahan -- was a Populist on a fusion ticket and in-
sisted on a competitive examination. That method, as then used
in rural districts, populated West Point with young school
teachers. It was not (as now) the West Point entrance examina-
tion that was used. Generally -- and certainly in this case -- they
gave a school-teachers' examination in the common branches.
They were full of trick questions in parsing, obscure geography,
and such mathematical profundities as "Multiply 16,768,543, -
762 by 267,345,987.61." There were also spelling inquisitions
based on orthography of which "phthisis" is a mild example.
I didn't have a Chinaman's chance of first place.

To get to Guthrie from Alva, you had to go to Kansas. Com-
ing back into Oklahoma from that state on my trip, I saw sev-
eral obvious candidates with the old rural pedagogue aura and
arms full of books. I got their names and Kansas addresses by
talking to them. Some even boasted that they were putting
something over on this Oklahoma "Pop" and one or two that
they were over-age. Of these one did have a bona fide Oklahoma
residence. He had just been visiting in Kansas.

He was a "slicker." He was dressed as he thought an Okla-
homa Populist ought to look. He regaled and terrified me by
boasting of his championships in Southwest spelling bees. He
recited the names of all the towns in the state of Zacatecas. He
parsed the longest sentences in the Bible in a kind of machine
gun staccato so rapid that you couldn't follow him. He stated
the famous ox problem, which lies in that dim field between
algebra and arithmetic, and then solved it orally. He finally

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