Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

This went on until the autumn of 1839, when a vacancy occurred in a small academy in the town of Dracut, across the Merrimack River, and the trustees asked me to take charge of the school. For my services I was to receive the tuition paid by the pupils, and that depended upon the number of scholars. It was a queer school. There were twenty-one scholars, about sixteen of whom were boys. The large portion of them were pupils who had found cause to leave the schools in Lowell, generally not because of their virtues. They ignored all discipline, and had routed the former preceptor. I, by habit of mind, was a disciplinarian, so that it happened at the end of three weeks I had lost eleven scholars out of my twenty-one, but no one of them had gone away without a thrashing, the remembrance of which would last him a lifetime. My revenues seemed to be diminishing, but the fact that I had disciplined my school brought some more girls and a different class of young lads, so that I soon regained as many pupils as I had lost, and at the end of three months I had five more than at first.

I took the utmost pains with my pupils, and spent every Wednesday afternoon and Saturday with most of them around me in the woods and pastures, explaining to them what I knew of trees, herbs, and flowers, minerals, and grasses, and the effects of light and shade. In a large closet belonging to the academy I arranged a camera and lenses, so that in bright afternoons I was able to show the refraction and dispersion of light by different lenses, and to exhibit to pupils the beautiful effect of prisms under a single ray of light, and the direction of the passage of rays of light through a cloud made by burning resin. The parents of the children became interested in such matters, for they had never seen the like before. Eventually, they provided means to darken The academy so that the experiments might be carried on with greater effect, and they attended.

Meanwhile, I gave six hours a day to my studies of law. At the end of the term, I had the honor to have an earnest application from the trustees to continue the school for another term at least. This I felt myself obliged to decline, although my finances sadly needed the tuition money, which would have been in the next term fair remuneration. My object was my profession, and it could not be delayed.