“He went, however, to calisthenics, and also through all the rooms, counting those who were present, and comparing them with the registers. After lunch, he examined the upper third in arithmetic, dictation, reading, geography, requesting Miss —— to give a history lesson before him.
“The children did the wildest things! I could have annihilated them over and over again. One young monkey said the ‘Artic’ Ocean was in some ridiculous place. He said, ‘What?’ She answered, ‘Artic.’ He said, ‘Spell it!’ To which, with the most graceful complaisance, she said ‘a-r-t-i-c.’ Was she not a wretch? Miss ——’s lesson was horrible—she dropped a few h’s, and asked foolish questions, which produced equally absurd answers. For instance, she asked some question about the death of Rufus, to which the reply was, ‘Oh, they carried him away in a dustcart!’ ‘William the Conqueror left the Holy Land to Robert.’ When corrected, the children said, ‘Oh, well, it was Canaan.’
“They were restless and fidgety, did not obey orders; and, in fact, were as dreadful as they could be. If the first class do not acquit themselves relatively better, our report will be a queer one. I have made an appeal to them.
“The inspection has produced the pleasing result that our children are not near the average of the same age in a National School. No grant under the revised code would be given to us. Charming, is it not? In spelling, for instance, the National School children are allowed only an average of one mistake in a class. Our little ones made eight and a half each instead of one each. In arithmetic, the standard is half a mistake, and ours made two and a half. The copy-books were reported as bad; everything was bad! But I do not mind, provided the elder girls come out well.”
The next experience does not seem to have been much happier, for on July 7 she says—
“I could not write yesterday. There were so many callers, and the fact is that, since the inspection of yesterday, I have collapsed, bodily and mentally!
“The heat, too, is dreadful, and I am quite overdone with it. The whole of last evening and this morning, except for an hour, I lay half unconscious on the bed or sofa, incapable of reading, thinking, or sleeping. I am in a state of tears whenever I think of Wednesday. I do not say the girls have not done well. In comparison, probably, with others, very well; but they did not do their best.
“In a really easy arithmetic paper, not one, or only one, touched the decimals. In history, they sat doing nothing for twenty minutes, although there was a question, ‘The dates of following battles.’ Actually, not one girl in my division attempted to give the least account of the battle, or result, or anything about it but the bare date, which, of course, in half the cases, would be wrong; because in our examinations, they said, it was of no use to do more than the absolute answer to the question. Is it not cruel to me, after my life has been given to the work?”
A letter dated 1869, five years later, shows how Miss Buss must have profited by the experience of this inspection, for she writes in very good spirits of the results of the Cambridge Local Examinations—
“All our girls have passed except one. Six of Miss Metcalfe’s have passed, one with second class, and one with third class honours. My list is good. Esther Greatbatch has first class, and two have third class. Of seniors, two have third class; so we have five honours. Three of the girls are distinguished in Religious Knowledge. On the whole we have done well.”