e instruction. They were mischievous and
inattentive; they kept close watch on the clock, and as soon as
half-past nine came they were up and off helter-skelter, as if the
gloomy precincts of the shop or the public-house were, after all, less
irksome than the night-school.

There was no recreation whatever for the growing girls, none for the
grown-up women; nothing but the public-house for the men, unless one
excepts the two or three occasions during the winter when the more
well-to-do residents chose to give an entertainment in the schoolroom,
and admitted the poor into the cheaper seats. Everybody knows the nature
of these functions. There were readings and recitations; young ladies
sang drawing-room songs or played the violin; tableaux were displayed or
a polite farce was performed; a complimentary speech wound up the
entertainment; and then the performers withdrew again for several months
into the aloofness of their residences, while the poor got through their
winter evenings as best they could, in their mean cottages or under the
lamp outside the public-house.

It was in full view of these circumstances that an "Entertainment Club"
was started, with the idea of inducing the cottage people to help
themselves in the matter of recreation instead of waiting until it
should please others to come and amuse them. I am astonished now to
think how democratic the club contrived to be. In the fortnightly
programmes which were arranged the performers were almost exclusively
of the wage-earning sort, and offers of help from "superior people" were
firmly declined. And for at least one, and, I think, two winters, the
experiment was wildly successful--so successful that, to the best of my
recollection, the "gentry" were crowded out, and gave no entertainments
at all. But the enthusiasm could not last. During the third winter decay
set in, and early in the fourth the club, although with funds in hand,
ceased its activities, leaving the field open, as it has since remained,
to the recognized exponents of leisured culture.

The fact is, it died of their culture, or of a reflection of it. At the
first nobody had cared a straw about artistic excellence. The homely or
grotesque accomplishments of the village found their way surprisingly on
to a public platform, and were not laughed to scorn; anyone who could
sing a song or play a musical instrument--it mattered not what--was
welcomed and applauded. But how could it go on? The people a