wenty "students," ranging from sixteen to nineteen years old,
were--no, not puzzling over it: they were "putting in time" as
perfunctorily as they dared, making the lesson an excuse for being
present together in a warmed and lighted room. When I went in it was
near the close of the evening; new matter was being entered upon,
apparently as an introduction to the next week's lesson. I stood and
watched. The master called upon first one, then another, to read aloud a
sentence or two out of the textbook with which each was provided; and
one after another the boys stood up, shamefaced or dogged, to stumble
through sentences which seemed to convey absolutely no meaning to them.
If it had been only the hard words that floored them--such as
"cotyledon" and "dicotyledon"--I should not have been surprised; but
they blundered over the ordinary English, and had next to no sense of
the meaning of punctuation. I admit that probably they were not trying
to do their best; that they might have put on a little intentional
clumsiness, in the instinctive hope of escaping derision by being
thought waggish. But the pity of it was that they should need to protect
themselves so. They had not the rudimentary accomplishment: that was the
plain truth. They could not understand ordinary printed English.

Of science, of course, they were learning nothing. They may have taken
away from those lessons a few elementary scientific terms, and possibly
they got hold of the idea of the existence of some mysterious knowledge
that was not known in the village; but the advantage ended there. I
doubt if a single member of the class had begun to use his brain in a
scientific way, reasoning from cause to effect; I doubt if it dawned
upon one of them that there was such an unheard-of accomplishment to be
acquired. They were trying--if they were trying anything at all--to pick
up modern science in the folk manner, by rote, as though it were a thing
to be handed down by tradition. So at least I infer, not only from
watching this particular class then and on other occasions, but also
from the following circumstance.

At Christmastime in one of these winters a few of the boys of the
night-school went round the village, mumming. They performed the same
old piece that Mr. Hardy has described in "The Return of the
Native"--the same old piece that, as a little child, I witnessed years
ago in a real village; but it had degenerated lamentably. The boys said
that they had