It was a similar sudden strain that produced from a Norfolk child the definition of a philosopher: “a little thing with two wheels what you ride about on.” Velocipedes were more common than philosophers in those days. But the safest path to comedy was to ask a thoroughly silly question, and to get answered according to one’s folly. It was, I remember, in what I may call the “Urim and Thummim” school, that while I was examining the children, the Rector was revising a heap of divinity examination papers from the training colleges. I heard a sudden guffaw, and begged that I might have the joke, while it was still warm. The question was, “What do we know of the antecedents of the man at the Pool of Bethesda?” And the appropriate answer was, “It is clear that his antecedents either were dead, or had grossly neglected him.” Fool meets fool. But this rash style of question is more common in oral examinations, and as one learns wisdom, comedy decreases. Twice a year, however, our work changed, and a great mass of examination papers poured in from the training colleges and other centres. The various subjects were allotted, as a rule, according to our previously declared wishes, and I took Geography, or History, with an occasional lapse into English Grammar and Literature. Year after year I used to jot down on an old atlas, or on the blank pages of a cheap history manual, as the case might be, the best jokes of the batch, and the accumulated treasures lie before me. For the information of the outside world it must be premised, that most of the candidates prepared for the examination in Geography and History by learning by heart wretched text-books put into their hands by their head-teachers. When the examination paper was laid before them, they at once wrote down such paragraphs or pages as seemed to meet the emergency. “But though they wrote them all by rote, They could not write them right,” as the admirable Cambridge bard sang. Moreover, having from long experience unbounded confidence in the leniency of H.M.I., they had no doubt that “their acts would receive the most favourable construction”; and if they could not remember the right page, they offered another very nice article, much superior to the one asked for; as if it were a patent pill; and they expected equal treatment for the changeling. An account of Richard II. might be out of stock, or at least they could not lay their hands on it: but surely an examiner would give _some_ marks for a biography of Richard III., with special reference to the murder of the little Princes. A map of Africa (our own brand) was surely as good as the demanded map of S. America: and if the man who asked for a list of the exports of British India were not satisfied with a highly imaginative list of the imports, at least he would not take off any marks from the other questions.