children and pointing them to far horizons. The sky displayed the

pearly warmth of a summer dawn, and all the painting was marvellously

bright as if with the youth and hope of the delicately beautiful

children in the foreground. She was telling them, one felt, of the

great prospect of life that opened before them, of the spectacle of

the world, the splendours of sea and mountain they might travel and

see, the joys of skill they might acquire, of effort and the pride of

effort and the devotions and nobilities it was theirs to achieve.

Perhaps even she whispered of the warm triumphant mystery of love that

comes at last to those who have patience and unblemished hearts....

She was reminding them of their great heritage as English children,

rulers of more than one-fifth of mankind, of the obligation to do and

be the best that such a pride of empire entails, of their essential

nobility and knighthood and the restraints and the charities and the

disciplined strength that is becoming in knights and rulers....

The education of Mr. Polly did not follow this picture very closely.

He went for some time to a National School, which was run on severely

economical lines to keep down the rates by a largely untrained staff,

he was set sums to do that he did not understand, and that no one made

him understand, he was made to read the catechism and Bible with the

utmost industry and an entire disregard of punctuation or

significance, and caused to imitate writing copies and drawing copies,

and given object lessons upon sealing wax and silk-worms and potato

bugs and ginger and iron and such like things, and taught various

other subjects his mind refused to entertain, and afterwards, when he

The History of Mr Polly