We often laughed, or groaned--according to our stand-point--at the niggardliness of country School Boards; but the shoe did not pinch us. Both in North Wales and in Norfolk we had to deal with many parishes where a penny rate brought in less than £10. Every third year there might be a contested election, and the cost varied from ¹⁄₂_d._ to 1¹⁄₂_d._ in the pound. Add to this the cost to each candidate, and the intolerable worry of a storm in a tea-cup, and it is not surprising that parishes thus afflicted were held up as awful warnings to unwilling subscribers elsewhere. An experienced observer in Cheshire once remarked, “If the average farmer had to choose between the Colorado beetle and a School Board, he wouldn’t know which way to go.” In all these small parish Boards there was a clerk, who charged from £10 to £20 a year for carrying on the correspondence which the rector had hitherto undertaken gratuitously. An Anglesey incumbent told me that he had offered to do the clerk’s work for nothing; but the chapel leader said that nothing should induce him to entrust the work to a churchman. One Norfolk Board School had an average attendance of five children; they cost £26 apiece, and it took a 3_d._ rate to pay the clerk: the total rate was 13_d._ in the pound. A Norfolk farmer rated on his thousand acres might be pardoned for an economic zeal that was not always well directed. It was proposed in one parish to raise the salary (£40 a year) of the head mistress. “Why,” said one member, “thet there young woman is gettin a matter of saxteen shellin a week: look what thet is for a young woman as hesn’t only harself tu keep.” “Don’t shoot them: they are doing their best,” might have been inscribed on the council chambers of many Boards. It was unfamiliar and uninteresting work for most of them; and they must have spent many weary days on it. In the early days of the institution it was usual for two or three members to attend the school inspection. I think the clerk would tell them it might soften “than which what’s harder? the (Jewish) heart” of the Inspector. They touched their foreheads like ploughboys, when H.M.I. arrived, and huddled together like their own ewes in nervous apprehension--near the gate. Where would this questioning end? Were the Board immune? “If yow were tu ast me some of them questions yow ast the childer,” said one bucolic bulwark of education, “I’d be tarrible put about. Same time, if I had yow on my farm----” I admitted my limitations. Latterly they ceased to attend. In one parish I saw no member of the Board for ten years, and when it happened that the school got a lower grant than usual, the Board of the adjacent parish reproached the absentees: “Yo shuld ha loonched th’ inspector: our chairman did, and us did well.” “Most people have their price,” said Walpole, usually misquoted: but mine is not so moderate.