The question was then proposed to the school—“Would you like to sing?”—“Yes,” from every lip. “You must promise to sing very soft and sweet,” quoth the master. “Soft and sweet,” reverberated from the whole of the scholars, like the tongue of an echo. Then came the “soft and sweet,” as they termed it; and if the _burden_ of a song could give _melody_ to the lips, it would have been more sweet than “the breath of the south wind upon a bed of violets,” as Avon’s favoured bard once sang; for it was all about our dear little Queen Victoria. To the tune of this loyal ditty they marched round the room, each class divided by their several teachers, carrying a pile of books, and then formed into semicircles, to be exercised in reading, writing, arithmetic, spelling, and grammar. Their spelling was very fair; many of them wrote a good hand; they all appeared conversant with the four first rules of arithmetic; and as for grammar, they talked about present tenses, and perfect participles, nouns, adverbs, and conjunctions, definites and indefinites, until I began to think they must have been born with a “Lindley Murray” in their mouths. I wish I could speak as well of their reading; but I suppose boys who talk about Hannibal and Artaxerxes, ecliptics and globular projections, and descant upon the merit of tenses, esteem it too common-place to read correctly words of two or three syllables. The average number of boys and girls attending this school is from 140 to 160; although, from the prevalence of the measles upon my visit, there were not more than half that number there. Young men are also received in this establishment as candidates for teachers; 100 of whom have, within these last four years, been disseminated throughout the schools in Antigua, and some of the other West India Islands, as fully qualified for instructing the rising generation in all the necessary branches of education. After experiencing the erudition of these advanced scholars, we passed into another part of the establishment appropriated to the use of the infant school. Here we found about sixty little creatures, two or three, to eight or ten years of age, seated upon their benches, raised one above the other—the elder ones occupying the upper tier.