I object to age and experience; I am all for youth and empiricism. After all, what is the use of experience in teaching? I could bet my boots that ninety-nine out of a hundred teachers use the methods they learned as pupil-teachers. Experience! I have heard dominies expatiate on innovations like Kindergarten and Blackboard Drawing. I still have to meet a dominie of experience who has any name but "fad" for anything in education later than 1880. I have never tried to define the word "fad." I should put it thus:--A fad is a half-formed idea that a sub-inspector has borrowed from a bad translation of a distinguished foreigner's treatise on Education, and handed on to a deferential dominie. * * * An inspector called to-day; a middle-aged kindly gentleman with a sharp eye. His chief interest in life was tables. "How many pence in fifty-seven farthings?" he fired at my highest class. When he found that they had to divide mentally by four, he became annoyed. "They ought to know their tables," he said to me. "What tables?" I asked. "O, they should learn up that; why I can tell you at once what sixty-nine farthings are." I explained humbly that I couldn't, and should never acquire the skill. I did not like his manner of talking _at_ the teacher through the class. When an inspector says, "You ought to know this," the scholars glance at the teacher, for they are shrewd enough to see that the teacher is being condemned. He fired his parting shot as he went out. "You must learn not to talk in school," he said. I am a peaceful man, and I hate a scene. I said nothing, but I shall do nothing. If he returns he will find no difference in the school. The bairns did talk to each other when the inspector talked to me, but when he asked for attention he got it. I am surprised to find that his visit does not worry me; I have at last lost my fear of the terror of teaching--H.M.I.S. XII. I went "drumming" last night. I like the American word "drummer," it is so much more expressive than our "commercial traveller." I made a series of postcards, and I went round the shops trying to place them. One man refused to take them up because the profits would not be large enough. As the profits work out at 41½ per cent I begin to wonder what he usually makes. To-day I talked to the bairns about commerce, and I pointed out that much in commerce was thieving. "This is commerce," I said: "Suppose I am a pig-dealer. I hear one day from a friend that pigs will rise in price in a few days. I at once set out on a tour of neighbouring farms, and by nightfall I have bought twenty pigs at the market price. Next morning pigs have doubled in price, and these farmers naturally want to shoot me. Why don't they shoot me?" "They would be hanged," said Violet Brown. "Because they would buy pigs in the same way if they had the chance," said Margaret Steel.