My marking made me for some time rather unpopular; and beginning at last to follow the time-honored injunction, "When you are in Rome do as the Romans do," I hoisted my boys from the sixties and seventies to the more plausible eighties and nineties. It was, no doubt, an unprincipled thing to do, but I soothed my outraged conscience with the thought that I was making a martyr of myself--that when the examination-week arrived the examiners' reports would confound me by exposing the difference between my paper and their gold. The examination-week did arrive, of course, and I found that I was to be myself the examiner of my classes. Let not the reader think that I would be pleasantly satiric when I say that not till then did I fully awake to the fruitful meaning of the expression, "American independence." And neither let him infer that I take such a school to be a representative American high-class school: I only say that it is a fair representative of a class of schools that is both numerous and popular in the cities I have named above. Here, indeed, was an application of the _sui-juris_ principle that, though it certainly eased my feeling of apprehension and doubt as to the probable results of the examination, yet filled me with a vague sense of dissatisfaction. And the reason is not far to seek: my English training would naturally have the effect of making me look for a verdict on my work not to my own notebook, nor even to the principal's returns, but to some higher and extra-mural authority who should test the attainments of the pupils and the efficiency of the school by a searching and impartial examination. In English middle-class schools the advent of the "Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board" is regarded with no small anxiety by principals, masters and scholars alike. It marks an epoch in their lives, and is the only period of the year in which there is anything like a _rapprochement_ between them, as if in the presence of some imminent crisis. The eccentric jackanapes who is by turns the butt and witling of the school stands for once consciously on equal terms with his principal, and can for once even "cheek" the school-bully with perfect impunity. All is excitement, anticipation, preparation and much consuming of midnight oil. Perhaps a very brief account, in conclusion, of the methods of procedure in these examinations may interest the reader; and in case he should think that my object in offering my sketch is to draw an invidious comparison between the English and American methods of examination, I refer him to an animated and interesting correspondence in the April issue of the _Nation_ between President Eliot of Harvard and Professor Adams of Michigan University--a discussion in which the former gentleman enthusiastically claims for the English method a degree of excellence which the most ardent home advocates of the system--who know its _working_ faults as well as its positive advantages--would hesitate to claim for it.