“Is a girl a mineral? Do you dig them out of a mine, like coals?” Chorus: Noo.
Now I seemed to have the landing-net ready: “If a girl is not an animal, nor a vegetable, nor a mineral, what is a girl?”
The first and second classes felt the horns of the trilemma, and they were silent: but a boy aged four, or so, rose from his seat in the third class, and in strident tones supplied the crushing answer:
“Hoo’s A WENCH.”
I fled into the next room.
Another story of discomfiture—more touching, because the discomfited one had not provoked her fate—comes to memory. The scene was a Sunday School. The suffering lady had hurried down on a sultry afternoon, and found her class unusually anæmic. She toiled womanfully, in spite of heat and consequent torpor, and it was not till she was faint with exertion that she seemed to detect a spark of interest. There was a low mutter, and she cheered up, as a fisherman does when after hours of nothingness he feels a timid bite.
“That is right, Mary dear; speak up; what did you say?”
“Woipe yer face.”
She never smiled again—in a Sunday School.
They spared neither age nor sex, and even the lookers on might be overwhelmed. This was the case at a school managed by a worthy vicar, whose most devoted ministrations were so little acceptable to his flock that his congregation had dwindled down almost to the point specified by Professor Henry J. S. Smith, of Oxford: “The attendants at Professor Z.’s lectures might be counted on the thumbs of two hands.” That at least was the current rumour. I was examining Standard II. (aged eight or nine) in the rudiments of geography, and we came to the word “desert,” which they defined as “a sandy plain where nothing grew.” I was anxious to get at the meaning of the word, in connection with “deserted,” and remembering a long-untenanted house at the end of their street, and just below the church, I put it thus: “As I was coming here I saw an empty building, all shut up, where nobody lives, and nobody goes: what should you say that house was?”