themselves hoarse, and twanging, tooting, or thumping themselves deaf. What was the result? As with the celebrated singer mentioned by Horace, whereas before they had never been willing to leave off that din of theirs at any spare moment, so now there was not a chirp to be got out of them. That hour, in which the musical babel had leave to break loose, was the quietest of the day; and the whole orchestra of flutes, concertina, banjo, drum, whistles, and so on, was henceforth as mute as the "harp that once through Tara's halls," etc. Jew's-harps became a drug in the market; one of the flutes was dismounted to be converted into a pea-shooter or something of the sort; the zither was swopped for a penknife with two blades and a broken one; and when our first baby came to be born, the owner of the banjo very kindly offered it to my wife as a christening present.

These plagues and the cure of them must be understood as extending over some considerable time. I have been simply presenting some of their ludicrous and trivial aspects, so that all this chapter may go as a mere prelude of drum and pan-pipes to a more stirring performance. Having thus set up my show, and, as one hopes, got an attentive audience about me, I am going to exhibit in dramatic detail the story of one of the first hitches in my work of reform; and from one the intelligent reader may learn the nature of all.

"CAVE!"

I.

THE first year of my provincial headmastership was naturally the most fruitful in troubles entailed upon me by my predecessor's "inactivity,"-a charitable term of reproach which I adopt from the mouth of the bishop of the diocese. For years I kept coming across dry bones and fossils of his period, a single one of which often enabled me to construct mentally his whole system of discipline: the boys had had to present themselves with more or less punctuality at certain hours, to handle certain books, to take a thrashing at uncertain intervals, when their old Gamp of a master was "so dispoged"; the rest had been largely laissezfaire. This hireling teacher had too evidently aimed at combining the minimum of trouble with the maximum of stipend, and naturally left his school very much out of joint, for me to set it right.

But it was during the first few months that once and again I had almost broken down before the stumbling-blocks, the faults of omission and

commission, the conservative prejudices against which I had to make head, for some time to little apparent purpose. Probably I was not judicious enough in my innovations: I know I tried to do too much at once, like the monkey with the nuts, and I think I made the same mistake as another potentate flourishing at that period, Napoleon III., in somewhat suddenly transforming an arbitrary despotic system into one aiming at constitutional government. Mary, who is the milk of human kindness itself, but whose ideas of management are naturally taken from the nursery, would have it that I erred in lack of surveillance and severity upon occasion. But I expounded to my inconsiderate helpmeet that vain laws are no good without morals; that enlightened treatment goes below the symptoms to deal with the cause of disease; that fruitful change must be a matter of organic growth; that good discipline should inform a school as a chemical, and not a mere mechanical mixture; that you drive out nature with a stick to no permanent effect; that the results we hoped for were to be fostered only by care and patience, and not by such active remedies as enfeeble the constitution in the long run, having always to be administered in increasing doses to purge the humours of a depraved habit,-in short, that health is strength, and not weakness. My theory was sound, and my illustrations were excellent; in the irritating friction of daily practice, however, I fear that I did not always bear in mind my

own maxims, but too often applied rule-of-thumb palliatives and stimulants to the symptoms of my little body politic. The above medical metaphors are not inappropriate to the course of this story, as will be seen when we reach it by-and-by, which cannot well be done without a full diagnosis of predisposing causes.

The result of this state of things for me was a crop of constant petty worries that would have destroyed the equanimity of a tortoise, far more of such a thin-skinned and by no means eupeptic person as myself. It is all very well for kindly theorists to prate about appealing to the reason or right feelings of boys; I should just like to see such philosophers put for one day in charge of a small country grammar school. The old doctors of discipline were quite as far out in appealing at every turn to the rod, by which in the end they only challenged daring spirits and callous skins to defy them. But, wherever you have a flock of thoughtless youngsters to keep together and drive to naturally undesired pastures, somebody must somehow do a good deal of shepherding, which will largely consist of prosaic and vexatious incidents; then, if the wilful sheep let themselves be fed to no visible fattening

"Alas! what boots it, with incessant care

To tend the homely slighted shepherd's trade!"

Thus I who had taken a second in moderations, I who had once hoped to be a minor Dr Arnold, I who might feel as capable as another of writing

upon the doctrine of the enclitic de, I who had actually published essays on the theory and practice of education, found myself condemned to a round of irksome duties which were partly those of a Brobdingnagian nursery-maid and partly of a Lilliputian police-magistrate. All day I slaved away at the Sisyphus stone of my pupils' ignorance; then no small part of my leisure time was taken up in cutting off the Hydra necks of my boarders' stubbornness. I had no real helper but Mary. At that time there was not even an assistant-master living in the house. I did make a futile attempt to work the monitorial system, but gave it up in despair, finding my senior boys not old enough, and not sufficiently removed from their fellows in interest and sympathy to play the prefect over them. The very servants seemed to be in league for the cause of irregularity and disorder. There was no one I could trust throughout my little state to aid me in carrying out its laws. All my subjects were united against me as the common tyrant. Pity the sorrows of a poor young headmaster! I was, of course, a headmaster in a very small way, yet still an undoubted head; for, besides occasional visiting teachers, I commanded the services, such as they were, of one regular assistant, living in the town, who had filled that position long before I came into office, and, to tell the truth, was less of a help than a hindrance, since it might not be said of him that "gladly would he learn and gladly teach." So the best part of my energy was perforce spent in