原文
"But I'm going to give it up, Anne dear," she wrote, "and go to college
next year. As I took the third year at Queen's I can enter the Sophomore
year. I'm tired of teaching in a back country school. Some day I'm going
to write a treatise on 'The Trials of a Country Schoolmarm.' It will
be a harrowing bit of realism. It seems to be the prevailing impression
that we live in clover, and have nothing to do but draw our quarter's
salary. My treatise shall tell the truth about us. Why, if a week should
pass without some one telling me that I am doing easy work for big pay I
would conclude that I might as well order my ascension robe 'immediately
and to onct.' 'Well, you get your money easy,' some rate-payer will
tell me, condescendingly. 'All you have to do is to sit there and hear
lessons.' I used to argue the matter at first, but I'm wiser now.
Facts are stubborn things, but as some one has wisely said, not half so
stubborn as fallacies. So I only smile loftily now in eloquent silence.
Why, I have nine grades in my school and I have to teach a little of
everything, from investigating the interiors of earthworms to the study
of the solar system. My youngest pupil is four--his mother sends him to
school to 'get him out of the way'--and my oldest twenty--it 'suddenly
struck him' that it would be easier to go to school and get an education
than follow the plough any longer. In the wild effort to cram all sorts
of research into six hours a day I don't wonder if the children feel
like the little boy who was taken to see the biograph. 'I have to look
for what's coming next before I know what went last,' he complained. I
feel like that myself.
語彙など
- tire of:うんざりする
- back-country:田舎の
- treatise:論文
- schoolmarm:女教師
- harrowing:悲惨な
- realism:現実主義,現実性
- prevailing:一般的な
- live in clover:ぜいたくに暮らす
- draw:引き出す
- quarter:四半期
- might as well:〜する方がましだ
- ascension:上昇
- ascension robe:Great Disappointment(1988.10.22)のときのキリスト再臨での話(?)
- to onct:= at once(?)
- rate payer:地方税納付者
- condescendingly:人を見下したように
- stubborn:頑固な
- fallacy:詭弁,虚偽
- loftily:尊大に
- eloquent silence:雄弁な沈黙
- interior:内部
- earthworm:ミミズ
- follow the plow:農耕を業とする
- cram:詰め込む
- biograph:伝記を書く