Mary Wilson in the front seat held out a bag of sweets to me. I took one. "Please, sir, would the gentleman like one, too?" Simpson took one with the air of a man on holiday who doesn't care what sins he commits. "I say," he whispered, "do you let them eat in school? There's a boy in the back seat eating nuts." I fixed Ralph Ritchie with my eye. "Ralph! If you throw any nutshells on that floor Mrs. Findlay will eat you." "I'm putting them in my pooch," he said. "Good! Write down this sum." "What are the others doing?" asked Simpson after a time. "Margaret Steel and Violet Brown are reading," I said promptly. "Annie Dixon is playing fivies on the sand, Jack White and Bob Tosh are most likely arguing about horses, but the other boys are reading, we'll go and see." And together we walked down the road. Annie was playing fivies all right, but Jack and Bob weren't discussing horses; they were reading _Chips_. "And the scamps haven't the decency to hide it when you appear!" cried Simpson. "Haven't the fear," I corrected. On the way back to the school he said: "It's all very pleasant and picnicy, but eating nuts and sweets in class!" "Makes your right arm itch?" I suggested pleasantly. "It does," he said with a short laugh, "Man, do you never get irritated?" "Sometimes." "Ah!" He looked relieved. "So the system isn't perfect?" "Good heavens!" I cried, "What do you think I am? A saint from heaven? You surely don't imagine that a man with nerves and a temperament is always able to enter into the moods of bairns! I get ratty occasionally, but I generally blame myself." I sent a girl for my bugle and sounded the "Dismiss." "What do you do now?" I pulled out my pipe and baccy. "Have a fill," I said, "it's John Cotton." * * * To-night I have been thinking about Simpson. He is really a kindly man; in the golf-house he is voted a good fellow. Yet MacMurray tells me that he is a very strict disciplinarian; he saw him give a boy six scuds with the tawse one day for drawing a man's face on the inside cover of his drawing book. I suppose that Simpson considers that he is an eminently just man. I think that the foundation of true justice is self-analysis. It is mental laziness that is at the root of the militarism in our schools. Simpson is as lazy mentally as the proverbial mother who cried: "See what Willie's doing and tell him he musn't." I wonder what he would have replied if the boy had said: "Why is it wrong to draw a man's face in a drawing book?" Very likely he would have given him another six for impertinence.