While we are remembering, let us look back for a moment upon our earliest school-days—the days of large text and round hand. Twenty urchins sit at a long desk, each intent upon making his _copy_. A nicely mended pen has been given to each. Our own labor goes on successfully, till, in school-boy phrase, the pen begins to splutter. A bold effort must be made. We leave the form, and timidly address the writing-master with—“Please, sir, mend my pen.” A slight frown subsides as he sees that the quill is very bad—too soft or too hard—used to the stump. He dashes it away, and snatching a feather from a bundle—a poor thin feather, such as green geese drop on a common—shapes it into a pen. This mending and making process occupies all his leisure—occupies, indeed, many of the minutes that ought to be devoted to instruction. He has a perpetual battle to wage with his bad quills. They are the meanest produce of the plucked goose. And is this process still going on in the many thousand schools of our land, where with all drawbacks of imperfect education, both as to numbers educated and gifts imparted, there are about two millions and a half of children under daily instruction? In remote rural districts probably; in the towns certainly not. The steam-engine is now the pen-maker. Hecatombs of geese are consumed at Michaelmas and Christmas; but not all the geese in the world would meet the demand of England for pens. The supply of _patés de foie gras_ will be kept up—that of quills, whether known as _primes_, _seconds_, or _pinions,_ must be wholly inadequate to the wants of a _writing_ people. Wherever geese are bred in these islands, so assuredly, in each succeeding March, will every full-fledged victim be robbed of his quills; and then turned forth on the common, a very waddling and impotent goose, quite unworthy of the name of bird. The country schoolmaster, at the same spring-time, will continue to buy the smallest quills, at a low price, clarify them after his own rude fashion, make them into pens, and sorely spite the boy who splits them up too rapidly. The better quills will still be collected, and find their way to the quill dealer, who will exercise his empirical arts before they pass to the stationer. He will plunge them into heated sand, to make the external skin peel off, and the external membrane shrivel up; or he will saturate them with water, and alternately contract and swell them before a charcoal fire; or he will dip them in nitric acid, and make them of a gaudy brilliancy but a treacherous endurance. They will be sorted according to the quality of the barrels, with the utmost nicety. The experienced buyer will know their value by looking at their feathery ends, tapering to a point; the uninitiated will regard only the quill portion. There is no article of commerce in which the market value is so difficult to be determined with exactness. For the finest and largest quills no price