“H’m! it sounds rational; I must think it over. Anyway, the results are pleasant enough. Four hours a day instead of six or seven--and much more work done, mind you--is good for both masters and boys. Then, most of them have resources and are on nobody’s hands. You’d be astonished to hear how much these fellows know, and each has his speciality. One little chap has butterflies, for instance. Ah, that reminds me! Don’t tell, or I might be invited to resign; but I don’t to this day know the difference between a moth and a butterfly. It’s the sort of thing one ought to know, so I set up a classification of my own, no doubt correct, because it was mine! Well, this befell me. ‘What have you there?’ I asked a little chap, who had evidently netted a prize. ‘A moth, sir, the ----,’ scientific name, pat. ‘A moth, boy! That beautiful creature is no moth. Moths live in houses.’ You should have seen the fellow suppress his grin! I couldn’t ask, so don’t know now; but make a point of not meeting that little chap’s eye. A friend of mine, a Fellow of his College, was worse. ‘I say, Oldcastle, the poets make a mighty pother about the song of the lark. Now, do tell me--do you know it when you hear it?’ But as for the boys that enter now, there’s not the natural object that they don’t both recognise and know all about. Their collections are of scientific worth--at least, so that fellow Hilyard thinks, so we are going in for a museum of local natural history!” “Why, Dr. Oldcastle, you’re like the man in the play, who talked prose all his life, and at last found it out! You’re our warmest friend, though you decline the connection. This, again, is the work of mothers following the lines of the ‘New Education.’ We make a great point of developing intelligent curiosity in the children about all that lives and grows within their ken. For instance, I should think most of ‘our’ mothers would feel disgraced if her child of six were not able to recognise any ordinary British tree from a twig with _leaf-buds_ only. It’s Nature’s lore, and the children take to it like ducks to the water. The first seven or eight years of their lives are spent out of doors--in possible weather--learning this sort of thing, instead of pottering over picture-books and A B C. But do fill the witness-box a minute longer. All this is delicious. An outsider who speaks with authority is worth a score of partisans.” “I bow my thanks, Clough, for the handsome things you are good enough to say. Of course my impartial witness would be quite as valuable if it told on the other side. Why, Hilyard, you’re nowhere! ’Tis I am the man of the day. But no; he’s the go-ahead fellow, and I’m the drag; yet a drag has its uses.”