ct one of the worst schools in New
York--perhaps one of the gaunt institutions to be found, together with a
cinema-palace and a bank, in almost every block on the East Side. But I
asked for one of the best, and I was shown the Horace Mann School.

* * * * *

The Horace Mann School proved to be a palace where a thousand children
and their teachers lived with extreme vivacity in an atmosphere of ozone
from which all draughts and chilliness had been eliminated. As a
malcontent native of the Isle of Chilly Draughts, this attribute of the
atmosphere of the Horace Mann School impressed me. Dimensionally I found
that the palace had a beginning but no end. I walked through leagues of
corridors and peeped into unnumbered class-rooms, in each of which
children were apparently fiercely dragging knowledge out of nevertheless
highly communicative teachers; and the children got bigger and bigger,
and then diminished for a while, and then grew again, and kept on
growing, until I at last entered a palatial kitchen where some two dozen
angels, robed in white but for the moment uncrowned, were eagerly
crowding round a paradisiacal saucepan whose magic contents formed the
subject of a lecture by one of them. Now these angels were not cherubs;
they were full grown; they never would be any taller than they were; and
I asked up to what age angels were kept at school in America. Whereupon
I learned that I had insensibly passed from the school proper into a
training-school for teachers; but at what point the school proper ended
I never did learn. It seems to me that if I had penetrated through seven
more doors I should have reached Columbia University itself, without
having crossed a definite dividing-line; and, anyhow, the circumstance
was symbolic.

Reluctantly I left the incredible acres of technical apparatus
munificently provided in America for the training of teachers, and,
having risen to the roof and seen infants thereon grabbing at
instruction in the New York breeze, I came again to the more normal
regions of the school. Here, as everywhere else in the United States
(save perhaps the cloak-room department of the Metropolitan
Opera-House), what chiefly struck me was the brilliant organization of
the organism. There was nothing that had not been thought of. A
handsomely dressed mother came into the organism and got as far as the
antechamber of the principal's room. The organization had foreseen her,
had