I roared. A cricket team would have been more particular in choosing a scorer. Would I mind calling on the erring elder, and on William C.? Not at all. We sallied forth and sought them. The affiliated elder was not at home. William C. was haymaking: he was old and deaf, and the chairman reproached him in stentorian tones: “Why, William, you did promise me to come down to mine[22] to meet the Inspector, if you never came again.” The old man grinned, and shook hands, and excused himself: “Yu see, sir, I’ve a dale of hay out, and I’m a bit hard of hearin, and they du all talk at once.” I gave him plenary absolution, and asked his consent to the better site. Whatever I thought right, _he_ was agreeable to. And we parted the best of friends. I had tea at the farm, and went back home. I laughed all the way to the station, and in the train, and I laughed in the small hours of the night. And I recalled how I once went with a colleague to see “The Tempest.” At the end of the first Act he turned in his stall and said: “Did you ever consider what admirable materials for a School Board they had on that island? Look here:” and he showed me his annotated programme. “Prospero, Tory Landlord, expert in Elementary Science, and Language, which he taught to Caliban. Miranda, qualified by entire ignorance to superintend the Girls’ sewing. Antonio, Liberal, Leader of the Opposition. Stephano, a drunken butler, representing the Trade. Caliban, Agricultural Labourers’ Union, Primitive Methodist interest. There you are; five members complete.” “And Ariel?” I asked, much interested. “The tricksy spirit shall be Clerk to the Board, and shall bamboozle the lot, and My Lords too.” There are some Educationists who never get free of the shop. Another Board annually stirred me to mirthful compassion, because I knew, and none other knew, that it owed its birth to defective arithmetic. The parish had a population of several thousands; when the school accommodation and requirements were compared in the early ’seventies, a nought got wrong, as noughts will do at times, and a deficit of 130 places was announced. The real deficit was 13, but it was no one’s business to check the figures, and 130 prevailed. The parish declined to build, and a School Board was duly elected. It spent the next ten years in pointing out to the Department in London that no new school was wanted; and My Lords unwillingly agreed: but no one found out about the nought. And it was a very useful Board, and, like the young man, Godfrey Bertram Hewitt, in _Guy Mannering_, was “in a fair way of doing well in the world, although he came somewhat irregularly into it.”