Il lungo secco will usher in your tall lantern-jawed
cadaverous-looking Yankee; la Barabarossa,
or il bel Signore, will describe your little
red-haired Scotch body, or your Scandinavian
giant, according to colour and merit; woe to
the short-sighted, who objects to hear himself
announced as quel cieco, or to the rheumatic
and unsymmetrical, who shrinks at the sound of
quel gobbo; il malinconico denotes your favourite
author, who speaks with a snuffle and looks
always ready to cry; but in general you are
startled at hearing a shrill Roman voice
announce La Signora bella Bionda di Palazzo
Albani, or il Signore Quattordici Capo le Case,
or whatever may be the name of the street and
the number of the house inhabited. But the
Romans think you absurd if you object to this
manner of description, and say "Ma che" with
greater force than when they deprecate the idea
that their own beauty is to be accounted to them
for a good work!

They are deplorably ignorant. They do not
believe that there are cities, lakes, rivers, or
mountains worth naming anywhere out of Italy;
they think that Vellintoni was the father of
Vashintoni, and that he died the other day
in London; they are horribly superstitious,
and they are dirty; they are priest-ridden; they
are enslaved; they have a foreign nightmare
weighing on them heavily; and they refuse the
manly teaching of self-support. Yet, for all this,
Rome is the most delightful place in the world
to live in, and the Romans are the most
delightful people. If one must suffer the pains of
human being anywhere, it is better to suffer
them in Rome than in half the favourite places
of the globe.

Thus Mr. Story, and a pleasant Story he is.

PIPETON-CUM-TABOR SCHOOL.

Our little school at Pipeton-cum-Tabor, in the
county of Dorset, is an inviting place. Roses
cockade the sturdy stone walls and the thatched
roof; honeysuckles blow their little fairy horns
in at the open windows. There is a sleepy
hum of bees without in the summer
afternoons, and a drowsy hum of children's voices
within. The thrush's song is not unfrequently
heard mingling with the drone of "twice two is
four."

Outside, in the glebe meadow, the clover is
purple sweet, and the little ones, sent there
to play for half an hour, bury themselves in
the high fresh grass, feeling for dry
grasshoppers, or chasing an entangled humble-bee.
Do you hear that burst of silvery voices? That
is the little Hullah class, practising in unison.
Do you hear that measured clap of hands? Those
are the little hands beating time. Do you see
that kindly man in black, coming through the
wicket-gate of the rectory-garden? That is the
Rev. Mr. Blank, the rector, coming to take his
Wednesday's class.

The little school, at our village of Pipeton-cum-Tabor,
is, I know, as good a school as any of its
size in England. The mistress likes her work,
and the children like the mistress. She is not a
slumbrous torpid old woman, nor a puzzle-headed
weak-willed young woman. She has a
power of command, she has a strong will, and
the children of Pipeton-cum-Tabor know it. The
school is worked upon the newest system, and
contains thirty-six children: no bad per-centage
in a village that does not number altogether
much more than a hundred souls. The clergyman
is an excellent and active man; the school is good,
the schoolmistress is good; and yet there is no
visible decrease, that I can see, in the ignorance
of Pipeton-cum-Tabor. What is to be done
with the Augean stable of stupidity; dark,
profound, muddy, and hopeless as it seems to
be?

The age of the youngest child in the school is
four, and the age of the oldest is eleven. This is
the village schoolmaster's great difficulty—his
first and last stumbling-block, his insuperable
obstacle. The child of four, the little rosy
dumpling, full of restless fun, and incapable of
mental application, is sent to school to keep
her safe while the mother is at work; it saves
a nurse, and it relieves the mother's mind from
apprehension. The child learns nothing, and
prevents others learning; but the child is safe,
and that is all the mother cares about. Our
village poor have little foresight, and no power
of combination, or the nursing mothers of the
village would hire among them a respectable
sober woman, to collect the children, and
watch them in the absence of their mothers at
work.

But the age of the eldest child at this school
points a much more lamentable moral. It
proves what the schoolmistress tells me—that
boys generally leave her school at nine years old,
and girls at eleven. As soon as a girl is strong
enough to carry a baby, she is sent off as an
under-nurse; as soon as she is old enough to
scrub a floor, she takes the mother's place at
home; and, from that time, she ceases to come
to school. As for the boys, long before they have
learnt to read or write, they are sent to keep
birds from corn, to drive plough horses, or to
watch sheep. They may only earn a shilling a
week: still, so great is the poverty in our county
of Dorset, that the father cannot resist even that
small inducement. Thus, poverty leads to
ignorance—an entailed ignorance—to which the
English labourer seems doomed generation after
generation. The father and mother are themselves
ignorant, and therefore cannot understand the
value of knowledge; they are without it, they
argue, so why should not Bill or Jack be without
it?

The course of study in the Pipeton-cum-Tabor
school includes texts, Church catechism,
reading, spelling, writing, arithmetic, the
elements of grammar, dictation, poetry, and
geography.

The holidays at our Pipeton-cum-Tabor school
are far too long, far too frequent, and not well