These are strange entries for a Dominie's Log. I must bring my mind back to Vulgar Fractions and Composition. * * * There was a Cinema Show in the village hall to-night. My bairns turned out in force. Most of the pictures were drivel ... the typist wrongly accused, the seducing employer; the weeping parents at home. The average cinema plot is of the same brand as the plots in a washerwoman's weekly. Then we had the inevitable Indian chase on horseback, and the hero pardoned after the rope was round his neck. I enjoyed the comic films. To see the comic go down in diver's dress to wreck a German submarine was delightfully ludicrous. He took off his helmet under water and wiped the sweat from his brow. Excellent fun! I have often thought about the cinema as an aid to education. At the present time it is a drag on education, for its chief attraction is its piffling melodrama. Yet I have seen good plays and playlets filmed ... that is good melodramatic and incident plays. I have seen _Hamlet_ filmed, and then I understood what Tolstoi (or was it Shaw?) meant when he said that Shakespeare without his word music is nowhere. Yet I must be just; philosophy had to go along with music when the cinema took up _Hamlet_. The cinema may have a future as an educational force, but it will deal with what I consider the subsidiary part of education--the facts of life. Pictures of foreign countries are undoubtedly of great use. The cinema can never give us theories and philosophy. So with its lighter side. _Charley's Aunt_ might make a good film; _The Importance of Being Earnest_ could not. The cinema can give us humour but not wit. What will happen when the cinema and the phonograph are made to work together perfectly I do not know. I may yet be able to take my bairns to a performance of _Nan_ or _The Wild Duck_ or _The Doctor's Dilemma_. * * * "Please, sir, Willie Smith was swearing." Thus little Maggie Shepherd to me to-day. I always fear this complaint, for what can I do? I can't very well ask Maggie what he said, and if he says he wasn't swearing ... well, his word is as good as Maggie's. I can summon witnesses, but bairns have but the haziest notion of what swearing is. (For that matter so do I.) If a boy shoves his fingers to his nose.... "Please, sir, he swore!" I try to be a just man, and ... well, I was bunkered at the ninth hole on Saturday, and I dismissed Willie Smith--without an admonition. But I am worried to-night, for I can't recollect whether Willie has ever caddied for me; I have a shrewd suspicion that he has. IX. The word "republican" came up to-day in a lesson, and I asked what it meant. Four girls told me that their fathers were republicans, but they had no idea of the meaning of the word. One lassie thought that it meant "a man who is always quarrelling with the Tories" ... a fairly penetrating definition.