ked with children," said I, pointing to the
many youngsters about the way.

"O," said he, "these children do not all come from the near houses, the
woodland houses, but from the country-side generally. They often make up
parties, and come to play in the woods for weeks together in summer-time,
living in tents, as you see. We rather encourage them to it; they learn
to do things for themselves, and get to notice the wild creatures; and,
you see, the less they stew inside houses the better for them. Indeed, I
must tell you that many grown people will go to live in the forests
through the summer; though they for the most part go to the bigger ones,
like Windsor, or the Forest of Dean, or the northern wastes. Apart from
the other pleasures of it, it gives them a little rough work, which I am
sorry to say is getting somewhat scarce for these last fifty years."

He broke off, and then said, "I tell you all this, because I see that if
I talk I must be answering questions, which you are thinking, even if you
are not speaking them out; but my kinsman will tell you more about it."

I saw that I was likely to get out of my depth again, and so merely for
the sake of tiding over an awkwardness and to say something, I said--

"Well, the youngsters here will be all the fresher for school when the
summer gets over and they have to go back again."

"School?" he said; "yes, what do you mean by that word? I don't see how
it can have anything to do with children. We talk, indeed, of a school
of herring, and a school of painting, and in the former sense we might
talk of a school of children--but otherwise," said he, laughing, "I must
own myself beaten."

Hang it! thought I, I can't open my mouth without digging up some new
complexity. I wouldn't try to set my friend right in his etymology; and
I thought I had best say nothing about the boy-farms which I had been
used to call schools, as I saw pretty clearly that they had disappeared;
so I said after a little fumbling, "I was using the word in the sense of
a system of education."

"Education?" said he, meditatively, "I know enough Latin to know that the
word must come from _educere_, to lead out; and I have heard it used; but
I have never met anybody who could give me a clear explanation of what it
means."

You may imagine how my new friends fell in my esteem when I heard this
frank avowal; and I said, rather contemptuously, "Well, education means a
system of teaching young peo