the nursery and more dreams in the board school. If more reality is wanted in the nursery, it is still more wanted in the schoolroom, though fortunately there is a great deal more there now than in the day of Lewis Carroll’s Alice. She, if you remember, in a moment of bewilderment reflected that she could answer some of Mangnall’s questions. You will only find Mangnall’s questions to-day in some dusty bookshelf of a country inn with the maiden name of a portly landlady in faded ink upon the flyleaf. It was simply a portable dictionary of elementary and usually inaccurate knowledge, dished up with most undesirably stuffy maxims, to be learned by rote and not to be understood at all. It could only convey the impression that the aim of lessons was to imbibe a certain quantity of dry facts without the slightest connection and forming no pathway to any connected presentation of reality. The old methods of the Misses Pinkerton’s academy and the old bogey-morality and dragon-instruction of the Goodchild family were still thriving when Alice passed into the looking-glass. The aim of that education was not to make a child an intelligent being or to bring out its natural talents by careful nurture, but, especially if it was a girl, to produce a docile parrot which could read, write and do sums, without asking too many inconvenient questions. To the arch priests and priestesses of that dead formula the idea of a child’s having tastes would have been a dreadful heresy: a child, at all events a girl, had no business with such subversive things. Her business was to acquire humility, deportment and a use of the globes, in fine to learn the things, and those only, which “a lady should know.”