I have heard Parsing and Analysis defended on the ground of their being an exercise in reasoning. I admit that they do require reasoning, but I hold that the time would be better spent in Mathematics. I hope to take my senior pupils through the first and third books of Euclid this summer. Personally, I can find much pleasure in a stiff deduction, but I find nothing but intense weariness in an analysis of sentences. My theories on education are purely personal; if I don't like a thing I presume that my bairns dislike it. And the strange thing is that my presumptions are nearly always right.
* * *
Folklore fascinates me. I find that the children of Forfarshire and Dumfriesshire have the same ring song, The Wind and the Wind and the Wind Blows High. I once discovered in the British Museum a book on English Folksongs, and in it I found the same song obtaining in Staffordshire. Naturally, variations occur. Did these songs all spring from a common stock? Or did incomers bring them to a district?
When I am sacked ... and I half expect to be some day soon ... I shall wander round the schools of Scotland collecting the folk-songs. I shall take a Punch and Judy show with me, for I know that this is a long felt want in the country. That reminds me:—a broken-down fellow came to me to-day and told pathetically how he had lost his school ... "wrongous dismissal" he called it. I wept and gave him sixpence. To-night I visited the minister. "I had a sad case in to-day," he began, "a poor fellow who had a kirk in Ross-shire. Poor chap, his wife took to drink, and he lost his kirk."
"Chap with a reddish moustache?" I asked.
"Yes, did you see him?"
I ignored the question.
"Charity," I said, "is foolish. I don't believe in charity of that kind. You gave him something?"
"Er—a shilling."
"You have too much heart," I said, and I took my departure.