The rural white schools are a different matter. It is, to be sure, nearly thirty years since old Bill Williams explained why there was no school in the Clover Bottom district in the Kentucky mountains: "They couldn't have no school because there wasn't nary door or winder in the schoolhouse. I've got that door and winder, and I paid a dollar for 'em; but I've been keeping 'em, you see, because there was trouble about the title. Jim Harris gin us that land, and we 'lowed 'twas all right, because it belonged to his gran'ther and he was the favorite grandson; but when the old man died it 'peared like he had willed it to somebody else; and I wouldn't put no door nor winder into no schoolhouse where there ain't no title, and there hain't been no school there sence. You want to know when all that trouble happened 'bout the title? I reckon it was fifteen or twenty year ago." There are still just such schools or rather such no schools in many parts of the South. Even in prosperous regions, buildings, apparatus, and teacher may be alike, dirty and repellent. Take, for instance, Mt. Moriah school in Coosa County, Alabama. The building is twenty-five feet square, inclosing a single room with two windows and two doorways, one of them blocked up. In the middle is an iron stove, around which on a winter's day are parked four benches in a hollow square, upon which, or studying in the corner, huddle and wriggle twenty-three pupils, ranging from seven up to twenty-one years of age. They are reading physiology aloud, in the midst of the gaunt room, with very little in the way of blackboards or materials. An example of the better district schoolhouse is in a populous region near the mill town of Talassee; a new building with eleven windows, well ceiled throughout, with a clean gravel space in front, good desks and plenty of blackboard. The curse of many of the rural schools is their easy money, for all the Southern states have a system of state school funds, the income of which is subdivided among the districts, and is in some of them about enough to keep up school three or four months on the usual scale of payment to teachers. When the school fund is exhausted, great numbers of districts close their schoolhouses, and the result is that the average number of school days in a year is far below that of Northern schools. In Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island the public schools are in session about 190 days; in Georgia, 118; in Arkansas, 87. These are averages; and since the city schools commonly run seven or eight months, there must be many districts in which there are not over fifty or sixty days' school. One of the great educational reforms now going on in the South is to secure from the local governments appropriations to continue the schools after the state fund runs out. When the South is sufficiently aroused to the blessing of education, it will find that it has money enough for its needs.