CHILDLESS SCHOOLS.
The dwindling of the villages is most clearly expressed in the schools. Let me give Huntstead, so nicknamed, as example. In the old days a famous old Puritan presided over sixty to seventy children. What a character he was ! He read the Old Testament lessons in church with invincible gusto, but his voice was less sympathetic to the New. Dis- cipline was the zest of his life ; and to increase occasions for exercising it he was forced to invent particular crimes. One day he was heard overwhelming a small girl with condemnatory phrases for the sin, as he called it, of " violeting on the Sab- bath." She had rashly brought a bunch of freshly picked violets to Sunday School ! In his place to-day is a woman teacher who presides over just eleven children, of whom two are boys. The school is almost as much too big for its quantum of scholars as the twelfth-century church for its Sunday congregation. In this particular hamlet the fall in numbers was dramatic. A few summers ago the number of children decreased by over two score in the interval of one single harvest- time holiday.
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