Many changes have been made in school-teaching in the country of recent years. The Government inspector is now abroad, and code and standard compel all within their iron rule. The old ruts and byways have been forsaken, and the coach of Learning has been made to roll, if not yet along the coveted “royal road” of the old saw, at least along a highway more uniformly paved than of yore. The difference in outside appearance between the wayside school-houses of to-day and of thirty years ago is only an indication of the changes which have taken place within. The days are past when any incompetent would do for a dominie; and in place of the halt and the palsied, who used to fill the pedagogic chair, there is now the pretty school-ma’am from some Normal seminary. A tyrant of the most petty kind, it is to be feared, the rural schoolmaster of the old days too often was-- Well had the boding tremblers learned to trace The day’s disasters in his morning face; Full well they laughed with counterfeited glee At all his jokes, for many a joke had he: Full well the busy whisper, circling round, Conveyed the dismal tidings when he frowned. Now all this is altered. No longer would it be suffered that a sour and crabbed dominie, too crippled to walk, should, out of sheer caprice and ill-temper, hurl his tawse at some urchin’s head, and order him to bring them up and be thrashed; and it is to be doubted if the modern “Board” would countenance even such a gallant device as the vicarious birching of a boy for the delinquencies of one of the dearer sex. Idiosyncrasies like these, no doubt, made much of the picturesqueness of school life in the country a generation ago; and people whose memories are of the old régime are apt to look back upon the former state of things, faulty as it was, with a sigh. Sometimes a head is shaken regretfully, and it is averred that with modern innovations are being planed away all those strong, rich peculiarities of ancient rural life which made character in the country interesting. The crabbed rule of the ancient village pedagogue has a charm for those who have escaped beyond reach of his tawse, the thrashings themselves of bygone days have become mere subject for a smile. Point of view, however, makes a considerable difference in the matter, and the unfortunate urchin of those days, counting the strokes of an ill-tempered and unreasoning castigation upon his nether habiliments, probably entertained a somewhat different sentiment.