"Touchy lot, these school-teachers!" mused Dr Mant on his way back to the town. "I never can like 'em, somehow. . . . Maybe I ought to have used a little tact and told him that, as I understood it, Mrs Steele called the meeting; and it was for women-workers only. That wouldn't quite account for Farmer Best though," he chuckled. "And I suppose Best and the Vicar, as Managers--yes, and Mrs Pamphlett's another--just put their heads together on the spot and gave leave to use the schoolroom, without consulting the Head Teacher at all. I don't suppose it ever crossed their minds. . . . No: on the whole that poor little man is right. Nobody in England ever _does_ take any truck in schoolmasters. They're just left out of account. And I dare say--yes: I dare say--that means we don't, as a people, take any real truck in Education. Well, and who's the worse for it?--barring the teachers themselves, poor devils! Germany has taken the other line, put herself in the hands of pedagogues, from the Professors down: and a nice result it's going to be for her, and for the rest of the world in the meantime! On the whole--" On the whole, the Doctor decided--faithful to his habit of looking questions in the face and so passing on--that these things worked out pretty well as they were. His reflections carried him to the bridge-end, where, in the porch of the Old Doctor's house, he encountered Mrs Polsue. "Ah! Good morning, ma'am! We are bound for the same door, it appears? That's to say if, as I seem to remember, a man called Nanjivell lives here?" "He does," Mrs Polsue answered. "And if I may make bold to say so, it's high time!" "Eh? . . . Are you looking after him? I'd no idea that he was really sick." "No more haven't I," said Mrs Polsue. "But I'll say 'tis time _somebody_ looked after him, if I say no more. In point of fact," she added, "I'm not seeing Nicholas Nanjivell, but a woman called Penhaligon who lives in the other tenement here. Her husband was called up last Saturday." "What, are you ladies at work already?" "Oh, _I_ don't let the grass grow under my feet," said Mrs Polsue. "Damn the woman, I suppose that's a slap at _me_," muttered Dr Mant to himself. But he tapped on the Penhaligons' door for her very politely. "Thank you," she said. "That's Nanjivell's door, at the end of the passage." He bowed and went on, came to the door, paused for a glance at the padlock hitched loose on the staple, knocked, and--as his custom was when visiting the poor--walked in briskly, scarce waiting for an answer. "Hullo!" Between him and the small window, almost blocking the light--on a platform constructed of three planks and a couple of chairs set face to face--stood Nicky-Nan, with a trowel in one hand and a bricklayer's board in the other, surprised in the act of plastering his parlour ceiling. "Had an accident here?" asked Dr Mant, eyeing the job critically. "Old house tumbling about your ears?"