Our district included, perhaps, two-thirds of the county, and overflowed into the ragged edges of Suffolk: the remaining fraction, the Fen district, was annexed to Cambridge. We had only one large town, Norwich: Great Yarmouth, the next in size, had only nine schools. Then there were about half a dozen market towns, where generally Church and Chapel maintained rival schools: the bulk of the work lay in country parishes, and involved drives of from ten to twenty miles before the morning’s school was reached. Our general plan of campaign was that my chief, being a family man with his home in Norwich, took the Norwich schools, and many others that were within a morning drive or a railway journey. I, being a bachelor, whose abode was in Early English lodgings, usually went off on the Monday morning to one of the outlying settlements, and made that a centre for the five days. As a rule I got to school about 10 with a margin. The children did nothing beyond the rudiments. I finished the work by 11.45, went to the Rectory, and inspected the garden, or played croquet with the Rector’s daughters: had a noble lunch; drove back to my inn, marked the school papers, wrote the Report, and posted it: and then--there was a night of Arctic winter length, and not a soul to speak to. Coming fresh from London club life, I found this plunge into solitude quite appalling. A philosopher, whose name I forget, remarked (see Cicero de Officiis) that he was never less alone than when he was alone. But he would have admitted that he was never so much alone as when he was alone in a market town inn:[12] the banal laughter of the commercial-room, and the murmurs of talk from the nightly assemblage of local magnates who frequented the bar-parlour, and interchanged pleasantries with the young lady at the bar--these rose up, as did similar sounds in Sweet Auburn, and made the hearer as melancholy as the bard. But this is merely a matter of habit. At the end of two years I found the life quite agreeable, and two of the hotels--Dereham and Fakenham, but I am not sure of the eponymous beasts, or heraldic bearings--sweetened comfort with an ever genial welcome. The country schools were usually very small, and sometimes very bad. A very green girl, fresh from the training college, would take a school, and at the end of the year would get a poor report. In her second year she would work with more vigour and more skill, and would get a Report sufficiently good to earn her Parchment Certificate.[13] Then she would take another school, or a husband, and the education of the village would relapse. I wonder whether this alternate method still obtains. “Amant alterna Camaenae” we are told, but I cannot remember that any of the Nine Sisters took any interest in Elementary Education.