I have already alluded to the change in the Code, which made the full grant for sewing depend chiefly on the merit of the work done before our eyes. There was a list of appropriate exercises, and to each girl was allotted one of these, to be completed in a given time. This was the death knell of the old sewing mistresses. They could not teach a class, though they were often very successful with individuals, and now grants were in danger. The exigency of the hour required new tricks to impose on the unsuspecting inspector. It happened one day that I had taken away with me the worked specimens--fragments of linen, calico, and flannel about three or four inches square, showing various stitches--and asked a skilled needlewoman to give me her opinion. She laughed me to scorn: it was machine work. I laughed her to scorn: I was not so easily taken in: I had seen the work done before my eyes in the Board School; there was no machine in the room. The reply was, that what I saw worked in school was not what I brought away. We differed, and the full grant was paid. Some years afterwards my eyes were opened. A lady who took much interest in the girls’ sewing, and with whom I had annual and delightful encounters, taunted me and the male sex generally with our incapacity to judge of needlework, and also with our hopeless gullibility. There was a school, she said--but nothing should induce her to reveal the name--where the mistress did all the specimens which I thought were worked by the girls, and these were cleverly palmed off on me in substitution for the patches, &c., on which I had seen the children engaged. I asked no questions, but my colleague and I, as we went home, ran over in our minds the schools within a convenient radius. There was only one of doubtful character, and thither my colleague went next month in the ordinary course. The girls had their sewing given out, and the work was going on in the usual way, when suddenly he noticed that each girl had a work-bag tied round her waist, and his suspicions were aroused. “What is in the bags?” “Oh, nothing: just the usual sewing materials.” He examined several: Mary’s bag contained a flannel patch complete: Jane had a neat piece of back-stitching: Susan had a button-hole complete: Harriet had so many rows of knitting. He reported to me. Then I saw it all. That old story of the Board School came back to mind: the work _was_ machined, and the girls, or the teachers--let us hope that the teachers did not make the girls parties to the fraud--had “palmed it” with a little sleight of hand, and perhaps a little appropriate “patter.”