d, having once
chosen his profession, he gradually developed an interest in it, a pride
in it, a love of it which astonished some of his friends. How irksome it
was to him at the beginning we saw just now in his address to the
Teachers. How irksome in many of its incidents it remained we can see in
his published Letters.

"I have had a hard day. Thirty pupil-teachers to examine in an
inconvenient room, and nothing to eat except a biscuit which a
charitable lady gave me."

"This certainly has been one of the most uncomfortable weeks I ever
spent. Battersea is so far off, the roads so execrable, and the rain so
incessant.... There is not a yard of flagging, I believe, in all
Battersea."

"Here is my programme for this afternoon: Avalanches--The
Steam-Engine--The Thames--India-Rubber--Bricks--The Battle of
Poictiers--Subtraction--The Reindeer--The Gunpowder Plot--The Jordan.
Alluring, is it not? Twenty minutes each, and the days of one's life are
only three score years and ten."

"About four o'clock I found myself so exhausted, having eaten nothing
since breakfast, that I sent out for a bun, and ate it before the
astonished school."

"Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday I had to be at the Westminster
Training School at ten o'clock; be there till half-past one, and begin
again at two, going on till half-past six; this, with eighty candidates
to look after, and gas burning most of the day, either to give light or
to help to warm the room."

"One sees a teacher holding up an apple to a gallery of little children,
and saying: 'An apple has a stalk, peel, pulp, core, pips, and juice; it
is odorous and opaque, and is used for making a pleasant drink called
cider.'"

"I sometimes grow impatient of getting old amid a press of occupation
and labour for which, after all, I was not born.... The work I like is
not very compatible with any other. But we are not here to have
facilities found us for doing the work we like, but to make them."

Still, his work as an inspector might have been made more interesting
and less irksome, if he had served under chiefs of more enlightened or
more liberal temper, as may be inferred from some words uttered after
his retirement--

"To Government I owe nothing. But then I have always remembered that,
under our Parliamentary system, the Government probably takes little
interest in such work, whatever it is, as I have been able to do in the
public service, and even perhaps knows nothing