It was well for Tommy that he did not live in the days of Elisha: well for Tommy that the she-bears were shut up in the Belle Vue Gardens. Not even the Diocesan Inspectors in Religious Knowledge are safe. One writes to me: “The children have a holiday after the diocesan inspection. Alluding to this yesterday in ---- school I said, ‘What is the pleasantest part of my visit to you?’ A. ‘That you don’t come often.’” The unexpected remarks were not always humorous: nay, at times they were intensely pathetic. I once picked up a beautifully clean baby from the front desk, and planted her on my knee, while the usual lesson on the cow, or the camel was droning on. She sat there in perfect content, apparently absorbed in contemplation of her best shoes, worn in honour of the inspection. Suddenly she turned to me, and murmured, “My daddy’s been thoompin’ our baby like anythink this mornin’.” “Gracious!” I said; “what had the baby been doing?” “Nothink,” she said, and relapsed into silence. It does not bear comment; it hardly bears thinking of. Less pathetic, perhaps, but yet touching in its way, was a remark reported to me from another Infant School. A little boy was gazing at a wall-picture of a bear. The mistress asked what he would do if he met a creature like that. “I’d run away.” “But the bear can run ever so quick, and he would catch you.” The infant pondered on the clumsy-looking beast; calculated its rate of speed by some method of his own, and finally replied: “He wouldn’t; not if I ’ad my mended boots on.” A pleasanter reminiscence from the same town. It was in the babies’ room: I was talking to the mistress, when suddenly a baby made a remark to the class-teacher, and both teachers exploded in hastily suppressed laughter. “What did the baby say?” I asked. “She saw you coming in, Mr. Kynnersley, and she said, ‘Is that my daddy?’” The situation might be embarrassing. Conceive it in a French novel; with the Inspector’s wife lurking in the doorway. The answers of these infants to their own teachers were a source of endless amusement; and sometimes they were saved up for me. One teacher had been giving a first lesson to her class on some animals. “That,” she said, in conclusion, “is what we call Natural History: all about birds, beasts, fishes, and insects. I will write it on the board: ‘Natural History.’ Now can any little girl tell me any fact that she has ever observed in Natural History--anything about a bird, or a beast, or a fish, or an insect? Yes, Mary, that is a good girl: what is it that you observed?” Mary: “Please, teacher, our baby ate a slug once.”