“improve” in his peculiar way some “occasion,” he would stand up in front of the top desk, and stop our work, Tapping his snuff-box, he would exclaim, “Boys!” And then he would utter, in the simplest manner possible, some half-dozen pithy sentences, perhaps giving his matter a humorous form, or more often pathetic one, What he said was too brief and too striking to be forgotten, and when he had said it work was quietly resumed.
He was a very good reader — not declamatory, but perfectly natural — and the pleasure he felt in reading aloud was frequently a temptation which he could not resist. The afternoon was the time when he read to us. To save us from disorder we were supposed to be writing our copies while he read. When our copybooks were spread upon our desks and our pens duly mended — I never saw anyone else mend a pen as he could — he would sit upon the top of the front desk facing us, and begin the reading. Except as to two occasions I forget all about what he read to us, On one of those two occasions he read ‘Rip van Winkle’ from a pirated French edition of the ‘Sketch Book,’ borrowed of a friend who kept the lending library on the Marine Parade, How the old man laughed, and how we laughed in unison! What it was he read on the other occasion I have forgotten, but it was something so genuinely pathetic that the old man’s voice broke with emotion, and tears flowed freely from his eyes, We lost all consciousness of being at school: we were for the time all boys together.
Carr's school was nearly broken up when the townspeople established a Proprietary Grammar School, and drafted into it many of their sons, myself among the rest. But Carr persevered with his diminishing number, until all the boys left but one. He taught that one for a fortnight, and then the lad’s mother, declaring she “ would have no more of that nonsense,” took her son away. Much of the old man’s subsequent leisure was spent in talking about his “old boys,” many of whom rose to positions of honour and usefulness in their native town or elsewhere. Several were mayors of Hastings. But Carr’s pet “old boy” was Isaac Todhunter. How many times in Inter years has the dear old man talked to me about Todhunter! Little Isaac was a dunce at figures, exceptionally so, until one day he was more bothered than usual with a role of three sum, But Carr put the boy on his mettle, and insisted upon his working at the sum until he conquered it. When at last Isaac succeeded, Carr gave a very unusual expression of his approval, and this — the old man asserted, and probably with correctness — was the stimulus that awoke Todhunter’s hitherto latent mathematical talent, There was in little Isaac the future mathematical light of Cambridge -
