She it was who split up the chopping board to light the fire, the first morning after her arrival, because she couldn’t find a bundle of firewood anywhere. On being referred to the stack of dry kindling wood in the coal shed—she had never heard of lighting fires with trees before; never thought, indeed, to live with a family that expected you to do such things! * * * * * On one occasion, when I was in one of the largest and poorest of the London Elementary Schools, where the children looked as pitifully sordid and poverty-stricken as I have ever seen them, I asked a few questions of one small girl in the front row of a class. Her outside dress consisted of an old dilapidated waistcoat worn over a dingy flannelette nightgown, while a ragged piece of serge fastened around the waist with a safety-pin did duty for a skirt. But she was only one among a classful of rags and tatters. “What is your name?” I asked, by way of starting conversation. “Victorine,” the forlorn-looking little thing replied. “And what is your lesson about?” I then inquired. “Therdelfykorrickul,” she informed me. Seeing the bewildered look on my face, the head mistress, who was showing me round, said, “Enunciate your words more carefully, Victorine, and speak slowly.” Victorine understood what “speak slowly” meant, and so she said very deliberately, “The—Delphic—Horricul.” “So you are learning about the Delphic Oracle. And what are you going to do when you grow up?” was my next query. “I’m going to work in the laundry like muvver!” We went into another classroom; here more ragged unwashed clothes greeted me on every hand. I had no need to ask the subject of the lesson, for the girls were facing a blackboard on which was written “The Characteristics of Shelley’s Poetry.” After I had seen more tatters in a third room, where a lesson was being given on “Infinitive Verbs,” I said to the head mistress, “If I had this school, do you know what I should do? I should take a class at a time, and give out needles and cotton, and tell them to do the best they could to sew up the rags in their dresses and their pinafores. I would not mind if they did not put on patches even to a thread in the regulation way, so long as they made some attempt to run together those rents and slits and yawning gaps. I would let the other lessons go till this was done. And I would not let a girl take her place in a class in the morning till she had mended as well as she could any rents she had worn to school.” The head mistress shook her head. “That would not be practical; you see, it isn’t in the Syllabus.” I don’t pretend to understand the inwardness of syllabuses, but I couldn’t help wondering if there wasn’t an opening here for a new one. While so much unpractical stuff is taught to the poorer classes in elementary schools, is it any wonder that the children know so little of the things appertaining to daily life?