end of the year
that the school was not paying, and the teachers (of whom there were by
far too many) were warned that they would have to be satisfied with half
salaries during the remainder of the school-year. This blow did not fall
very heavily on any one but myself, as all the other teachers had
engagements in other schools, as well as friends and relatives
throughout the city. The boys were very fickle: a succession of bad
averages on their weekly reports would send them off in high dudgeon to
some other school; and though there were fresh accessions taking place
from time to time, the frequent interchanging was injurious alike to the
tone of the school and to the school exchequer. There were, too, one or
two bad boys who should have been expelled, but whose expulsion would
have lost to the school their independent sympathizers as well, and so
would have seriously embarrassed the finances. An American principal
with a bevy of "free and independent" youths to cater for is in an
inconceivably different position from his English _confrere_, who is
empowered to read his pupils' weekly letters to their parents and to
send a policeman in pursuit of any runaway malcontent among them. From
the moment an English boy leaves his father's house he is under the
complete control of his principal, and consequently a ruinous veering
about from school to school is effectually prevented, while the
retention of a decidedly vicious boy would obviously be a most
unprofitable policy. I have seen a rich English parent bring back his
truant offspring to be soundly flogged in presence of his grinning
schoolmates--an ugly spectacle, and now happily a rare one in England;
but the reverse of the picture, though far less shocking, is by no means
pleasantly suggestive. I have heard an American lady express her
surprise to a principal, with unmistakable tartness in her tone, that
her son, who was at once the idlest and most troublesome boy in his
class, always brought home averages of sixty or seventy, "when young
A----, who lives next us, and is considered quite a slow boy, receives
ninety and over every time. _Don't_ you think there must be some
mistake, or--or unfairness--in the marking?"

Only ten of my sixteen boys had been in the school before that year, and
of those ten only four had passed through the regular curriculum of the
school from the primary department to the graduating class. Those four
were notably the most advanced and the onl