out on hire garments for the day of inspection. This may be regarded as evidence not so much of what was done, as of what was possible. It is certain that in some other schools the best girls made all the garments, and the work of the inefficient was suppressed.

When the Code made fraud too easy, I blamed the Code. In those days every pupil-teacher, and every woman sitting for a certificate, had to present to the Inspector a garment as evidence of her skill as a needlewoman and on this she got marks which counted for the examination. There was nothing on earth to show that the presenter of the garment had made it, and of course one could not ask questions. "I am surprised that Mary Jane has failed," said a schoolmistress of my acquaintance, "she wasn't that bad at sums, and it wasn't for her needlework, for I did that myself."

Oh, Adam! When we remember that he had no one to associate with but Eve, we cease to wonder that his moral sense weakened. "SHE gave me of the tree."

One more reminiscence. Lady managers often would say to me, "Why don't the girls learn to sew? They come here as servants, after having been in the school for years, and they can't do a thing?" I heard this I heard this repeated for years, and could not reply. Nor indeed did I pay much heed lady managers were always on the warpath. But one day I mentioned the gravamen to a colleague, and asked how he explained this failure of our system of

education.

"Pooh, pooh," he replied, "did you ever hear of the monkeys on the West Coast of Africa, or somewhere, who, according to the natives, could talk if they liked, but they won't, because, if they did, they would have to work ? That is what is the matter with our girls. They go out to

service, and if they confess that they can sew, they are put on to do all the household sewing, besides their regular work so they pretend they are useless and the 'missus' gets a machine."

It may be so it is only married men who are in a position to reveal the secret workings of domestic life. "When you're a married man," said Mr. Weller, “you'll understand a good many things as you don't understand now "I commend the rest of his profound utterance to the attention of the reader. It occurs in Chapter XXVII. of Pickwick.1

1 "But vether it's worth while goin' through so much, to learn so little, as the charity-boy said ven he got to the end of the alphabet, is a matter o' taste. I rayther think it isn't.

CHAPTER XXVIII

UPHEAVAL

"Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee, thou art translated."

-Midsummer Night's Dream.

IN 1902 came Mr. Balfour's great Education Act, putting the whole control of all Public Elementary Schools (exceptis rebus divinis, in Baconian phrase) into the hands of the local authorities. This altered the whole machinery of inspection. Hitherto our districts had been limited by the boundaries of large boroughs, or of poor law unions, though we had nothing to do with corporations, or guardians. Now, if I might borrow the words of Froude in the purplest of his purple patches, "the paths trodden. by the footsteps of ages were broken up." Henceforth our little domains were to be co-extensive with a county, or with one or more large towns. A new Secretary to the Board of Education was appointed, "with fear of change perplexing (our) monarch's" inspectors. Where is my

Ravenshoe?

"When the head of a great family dies, relations are changed entirely between some score or two of persons. The dog of today is not the dog of yesterday . . . . Perhaps even the old hound wonders whether he is to keep his old place by the fire or no; and younger brothers bite their nails, and wonder, too, about many things."

Towards the end of the year I, among others, was summoned to the Office and had my interview. In a few days came the announcement that I was appointed to the care of Manchester, and at the same time to the Chief Inspectorship of the North-Western Division. The local paper, which reported the change to a disconsolate city, declared in picturesque language that I was to rule from the Mersey to the Solway, and from the Pennine Range to the Calf of Man.

In other words, the Division included Lancashire, Cumberland, Westmorland, and the Isle of Man.

There were advantages and disadvantages, with which I need not trouble the reader. When Bishop Stubbs was moved from Chester to Oxford, he said, with his accustomed humour, that, "like Homer, he suffered from translation." What should I lose or gain from my translation? I soliloquized for a while, like Hamlet, whether to bear those ills I had, or fly to others that I knew not of; but, unlike Hamlet, I chose the latter, because, in any case, it could not be for more than four years, whereas Hamlet contemplated a considerably longer stay in his undiscovered bourne. I did myself the honour to accept, and assumed charge of the children of 600,000 people in the district, and of about 5,000,000 in the Division. In a few months Cumberland and Westmorland were, to my great regret, taken from me, and Cheshire, more convenient but less beautiful, was substituted.

The Division then consisted of the two counties palatine and the Isle of Man. There was a staff of

about forty-five inspectors and sub-inspectors, whose diurnal and annual revolutions I was supposed to oversee.

1 Note that I fully admit the right of the County of Durham to this meaningless title, and also to immunity from me.

At the time of this alteration I also exchanged the title of Chief Inspector for that of Divisional Inspector. The substitution of five syllables for one is always to be deprecated, but that was the limit of my injury.

What are the duties of a Senior, or Chief, or Divisional Inspector? (I have lived to see the three dynasties.)

It is difficult to sum them up concisely. The professional reader knows them already: the unprofessional reader would not be interested. Briefly I may say, that he has to see that the District Inspectors and their staff do their work, and maintain the requisite standard of education; he has to advise the staff in all cases of difficulty; he has to hold enquiries in cases of dispute between the District Inspector and the local authority. Also he has to attend conferences at the Office, and to advise the Board "before any important change is made." Lastly, he had in alternate years to compile a Blue Book report on the state of education in the Division.

I may say at once that the two last duties gave me little or no trouble. When I resigned, there had been no conference for eighteen months, and no divisional reports have been required for five years. I cannot say that the conferences were profitable to the nation: in fact, so far as I remember, they were chiefly confined to questions of official organisation; but they gave one a convenient opportunity of meeting old colleagues at the expense of the Consolidated Fund. The Blue Book report-if I may quote Mr. Curdle 1" as an exquisite embodiment of the (Inspector's) visions, and a realisation of human intellectuality, gilding with refulgent light our dreamy moments, and laying open a new and magic world before the mental eye, is gone, perfectly gone. I cannot say

1 "Nicholas Nickleby," Chapter XXIV,