How _can_ an elementary schoolmaster in a remote country village be a reading-man, or what motive has he to get out of the narrow groove in which he has been brought up? The best teachers, as a rule, are they who know their work best and very little indeed outside it. “How is it that at Dumpfield they don’t get a larger grant?” I asked one day of an inspector noted for his shrewdness and good sense. “Surely Coxe is by far the ablest and most brilliant teacher for miles round; he is almost a man of genius?” “Precisely so,” was the reply, “the man’s out of place. These brilliant men with a touch of genius are a nuisance in an elementary school. My dear fellow, never let a _man of views_ come into your school. Keep him out. Beware of the being who is for revolutionizing spelling and grammar!” Mr. Petticogge is not a man of genius, only a better sort of elementary schoolmaster, and entirely absorbed in his work. He, too, as all the members of his fraternity do, occupies a position of isolation, and between him and the parson there is just so much in common as to make each hold aloof from the other without making either of them congenial to their other neighbours. As for the rest of friend Burney’s neighbours, take them in the gross, and you may say of them what the ticket-of-leave man said of the Ten Commandments; “They’re rather a poor lot and you can’t make much out of ’em.” I know no class of men who are less sociable than the smaller farmers, as we reckon smallness in the East. I mean the men who hold a couple of hundred acres and under. It has often been laid to the charge of the great occupiers in West Norfolk and elsewhere that in the good times they were lavish beyond all reason in their hospitalities. I believe there never has been anything of the sort among the smaller men; they are not unfriendly, they are not wanting in cordiality, but they are not companionable. It is my privilege to know some who are notable exceptions to the all but universal rule. I have not far to go from my own door to find one whom I never pay a visit to without pleasure and profit, one who has for many years been a great reader of Lord Tennyson’s poems, has strong opinions on politics and the questions of the day, a thoughtful, resolute, and true-hearted woman, who farms a hundred acres of land without a bailiff, and, among other evidences of her good taste and intelligence, is a diligent reader of the _Spectator_. But such are few and far between.