Duncan was talking about awkward moments to-night, and he told of the shock he got when he joined the army and found that the sergeant of his squad was an old pupil of his.

"I think I can beat that, Duncan," I said, and told him the story of an army lecture. I had a commission in the R.G.A. for a short time, and one morning I had to give a lecture to the men of the battery on lines of fire. They were mostly miners, and I tried to make the lecture as simple as possible. I began with the definition of an angle and went on to circular measurement. I noticed that one man stared at the blackboard in bewilderment, a very stupid looking fellow he was. When the lecture was over I approached him.

"I don't think you understood what I was trying to tell you," I said.

"I did have some difficulty in following it, sir," he said.

"H'm! What were you in civil life?"

"Mathematical master in a secondary school, sir."

I could not rise to the occasion. I fled to the mess and ordered a brandy and soda.

Speaking about rising to the occasion brings to my mind another army incident in which I did not shine. I was a recruit in the infantry, and a gym sergeant was putting us through physical jerks. He told us the familiar tale that although we had broken our mothers' hearts we wouldn't break his; in short he put the wind up us. I got very nervous.

"Right turn!" he roared, and I thought he said "Right about turn."

He told the squad to stand easy, and then he eyed me curiously.

"You! Big fellow! Take that smile off your face!"

I don't know why he said that for I couldn't have smiled at that moment for anything less than my ticket. He studied me carefully for a bit, then enlightenment seemed to dawn on him.

"I got it!" he exclaimed triumphantly.

"I know wot's wrong with you! You've got a stupid face; you can't think; you never thought in yer life."

I looked on the ground.

"Did yer ever think in yer life?"

"No, sergeant," I said humbly.

"I blinkin' well thought so!" he said and moved away.

Then the worm turned. Who was he that he should bully a scholar and a gentleman? I would lower him to the dust.

"Sergeant!"

He turned quickly.

"Wot d'ye want?" and he tried to freeze me with his look.

"It isn't my fault I can't think, sergeant; I was unfortunate enough to spend five years at a university."

His mouth gaped, and his eyes stared, but only for a moment. Then he rose to the occasion.

"I blinkin' well thought so!" he cried. "Squad! . . . . Tshun!"

* * * * *

It is Sunday night, and I have just been to town. At the Cross I stood and listened to a revivalist bellowing from a soap-box. His message was Salvation but I was more interested in the man than his message. Consciously he is out to save sinners, but I suspect that unconsciously he is out to draw attention to himself. I do not blame him. I do the same thing when I publish a book; Lloyd George and George Robey and the revivalist and I are all striving each in his little corner to draw attention to ourselves.

The exhibition impulse is in every child. A child loves to run about naked, but then society in the form of the mother steps in and says: "You must not do that!" But we know that every wish lives on in the depths of the mind, and the childish wish to exhibit the body appears in later years as a desire to preach or sing or act or lecture.

This is the psychology of the testimonials for liver pills which appear in every local paper. It is the psychology of much crime. Many a slum youth glories in having been birched, simply because his gang looks on him as a hero.

I hasten to state that exhibitionism alone does not make a Cabinet Minister or a comedian. There are other motives from infancy, an important one being the desire for power. I recall that as a boy I delighted in following a drove of cattle and smiting the poor creatures hard with a cudgel. Freud would say that in this way I was releasing sex energy, but I think that the infantile sense of power was at the root of my cruelty; here was I, a wee boy, controlling a big heavy stot. It is love of power that makes little boys want to be engine-drivers.

To the teacher this love of power is the most vital thing in a child's make-up. Discipline thwarts the boy at every turn, and our adult authority is fatally injuring the boy's character. Our task is to provide the child with opportunity to wield his power. We suppress it and the lad shows his power in destructive instead of constructive activities. I find that I keep returning to this subject of suppression, but it is the most important evil in education. It does not matter how perfect a teacher makes his instruction in arithmetic; if he has not come to see that suppression of a child is a tragedy, his instruction is of no value. From an examination point of view, yes; from a spiritual point of view, no.

* * * * *

Parents and teachers fail because they cannot see the world as the child sees it. The child of three is a frank egoist. He cares for no one but himself, and the world is his. Anger him and he would have you drawn and quartered if he had the power. His instincts prompt him to master his environment, and to begin with, when he is a few weeks old, his environment and his own person are indistinguishable.

Homer Lane gives a delightful description of the child's first efforts and how they are frustrated by ignorant adults.

"At a very early age the child becomes aware through various processes that his own hand which he has seen moving across his line of vision is a part of himself, and that he can move it himself. He has discovered power. He then enters upon his career. The same motive that will govern his behaviour for the rest of his life comes into operation, and he wants to use this new-found power for some purpose that will increase his enjoyment of life. Up to this time he has had only one pleasure, and that was to do with the commissariat. Having discovered power over his fist he therefore wants to put it in his mouth . . . a difficult task requiring much practice and patient perseverance.

"As he goes on working he learns that his power increases with effort, and now his motive is modified. At first it was purely materialistic; he wanted to have his fist in his mouth. Now he wants to put it there. His interest is in doing the thing rather than in having it.

"This is the spiritual element in his present desire, and now comes the first mistake in education. The mother, analysing the behaviour of the child, has noticed his complaint at the difficulty of the task as fatigue sets in, and, misunderstanding the motive of the child she helps him to put his fist in his mouth. But that is just what the child did not want, and he protests violently against this interference with his purpose in life.

"The mother again makes a false analysis of the situation, and concludes that his protest is the result of his disappointment that there is no nourishment in the fist. She then gives him food or paregoric, whatever may be her method of dealing with the spiritual unrest of her child, and thus drugs his creative faculties."

I have said that the infant is an egoist. If his egoism is allowed full scope he will enter upon the next stage of life, the self-assertive stage, with a huge capacity for being altruistic. This stage comes on about the age of six or seven. But if the child has had parents who believe in moulding character he will have had many severe lectures about his selfishness. These lectures will not have cured his selfishness; they will have driven it underground for the moment. The selfishness of adults is one result of the moral lecture in childhood, for no wish or emotion will remain buried for ever.

The age of self-assertion is the rowdy age, and naturally it is now that father uses his authority. The child is still ego-centric, but in a different way. At the age of three he was the king of the world; at the age of seven he is the king of the other boys who play with him. He is now reckoning with society, and he uses society as a background against which he may play the hero. Thus be bleeds Jack's nose for no reason in the world other than that he thus asserts himself. If he plays horses with the boy next door he insists upon being the driver.

It is at this period that he should be free from authority. If authority in the shape of father or teacher or policeman steps in to suppress his self-assertion the boy becomes an enemy of all authority and very often anti-social. The "rebel" in the Socialist camp is a good specimen of the man whose self-assertive period was injured by authority, and I suspect that the truculent drunk is letting off the steam that he should have let off at the age of eight.

The third stage in the evolution of a child is the adolescent stage. For the first time the boy becomes a unit in society. Hitherto he has played for his own hand; his games have been games in which personal prowess was the desired aim. Now he feels that he is one of a team. Even before puberty the team-forming impulse is seen; Putter, for instance, in The Boy and his Gang, gives ten to sixteen as the gang age.

These divisions are purely arbitrary, and children differ much in evolution. The teacher, however, should have a general knowledge of these three phases. I have often seen a school prescribe cricket or hockey for boys who are still in the self-assertive stage. The result was that, having no team impulse, each boy had no further interest in the game when the umpire shouted: "Out!"

I used to umpire for boys and girls of eight to eleven, and it was a tiresome business. Quite often when a boy had been bowled with the first ball, he would throw down the bat in disgust and refuse to give the other side an innings. There was nothing wrong with the children; what was wrong was that a team phase game was being forced on a self-assertive phase group.

* * * * *

Duncan and two other dominies were in to-night and we got on to golf yarns. I remarked that there were very few good ones, and they all trotted out their favourites. I liked Duncan's best.

An oldish man was ploughing his way to the tenth hole at St. Andrews, and, when he ultimately holed out in nineteen, he turned to his caddie.

"Caddie," he cried in disgust, "this is the worst game I ever played."

The caddie stared at him open-mouthed.

"So ye have played afore, have ye?" he gasped in amazement.

Why are there no cricket or football stories, I wonder? Possibly because they are team games; a team is a crowd, and I never heard of a joke against a crowd. A crowd is an impersonal thing, and no one can joke about an impersonal thing. I never heard of a joke about the moon or a turnip. Yet are there not jokes against a nation, and a nation is a crowd? Take the joke about the Scot who was brought up at Bow Street for being drunk and disorderly. The magistrate, before passing sentence, asked the accused if he had anything to say for himself.

"Weel, ma lord, it was like this. I travelled frae Glesga to London yesterday, and I got into bad company in the train."

"Bad company?"

"Aye, ma lord. When I got into the train at Glesga Central I had twa bottles o' whuskey in my bag, and . . . a' the other men in my compartment was teetotal."

That looks like a joke against a long-suffering race, but is it so in reality? Make the traveller an 'Oodersfield' man on his way to see the Cup-tie Final at Chelsea, and it is not changed in essence. Only it has become a convention that the Scot is a hard drinker. It is the personal touch that makes the joke, and it is the individual that we laugh at.

I presume that the typical joke about Scots' meanness appeals to Englishmen because Englishmen are mean themselves. No joke appeals to a man unless it releases some repressed wish of his own. No one expects a devout Roman Catholic to see the point of a joke about extreme unction. The professional comedian to be a success must know what the crowd repressions are. Dickens is a great humorist because he knew by intuition what the crowd would laugh at. And that brings me to the subject of human types.

Broadly speaking there are two types of man. One is called an extrovert (Latin, to turn outwards); he identifies himself with the crowd, and he lives the life of the crowd. Lloyd George and Horatio Bottomley are typical extroverts; they seem to know instinctively what the crowd is thinking, and unconsciously they speak and act as the crowd wants them to speak and act. Dickens was another, and that is why he has so universal an appeal.

The other type, the introvert type, turns inward. They do not identify themselves with the crowd. What the public wants does not concern them; they give the crowd what they think it ought to want. This class includes the thinkers, the men who are in advance of their time. An introvert is never popular with the crowd because the crowd never understands him. He can never get away from himself, and he sums up events according to the personal effect they have on himself. Yet to the unconscious of the introvert crowd opinion is of the greatest importance.

In the realm of humour the extrovert is a success; what amuses him amuses the crowds. But the introvert laughs alone, and in some cases he decides that the crowd has no sense of humour, and he becomes a cynic.

It is necessary that the teacher should be able to recognise the different types. The extrovert is popular; he it is who leads the gang. Doubts and fears do not trouble him; life is pleasant and he laughs his way through it. But the introvert is the boy who stands apart in a corner of the playground; he is timid and fears the rough and tumble of team games. He feels inferior and he turns in upon himself to find superiority. Thus he will day-dream of situations in which he is a hero like David Copperfield when he stood at Dora's garden gate and saw himself rescuing her from the burning house.

I think that the job of the teacher is to help each type to a position midway between introversion and extroversion. The boy who lives in the crowd might well be tempted to take more interest in his own individuality, and the introvert might well be encouraged to project his emotions outward.

* * * * *

To-night Mac told me a story about old Simpson the dominie over at Pikerton. Last summer an English bishop was touring Scotland, and one morning he drove up to Simpson's school in a big car, flung open the door and walked in.

"Good morning, children," he cried.

The bairns sat gazing at him in awe. He turned to Simpson.

"My good sir," he protested, "when I enter a village school in England, the children all rise and say: 'Good morning, sir'!"

"Possibly," said Simpson dryly, "but in Scotland children are not accustomed to see strangers walk into a school. Scots visitors always knock at the door and await the headmaster's invitation to enter."

* * * * *

Mac and I were talking about education to-night.

"I never heard you mention the teaching side of education," he remarked. "Giving a child freedom isn't enough, you know. What about History and Geography and so on?"

"I think they are jolly well taught in many schools, Mac," I said. "It is the psychological side of education that is a thousand years behind the times."

"Yes," said Mac doubtfully, "but suppose you have a school of your own,
I presume you'd teach the English yourself?"

I nodded.

"How would you do it?"

I thought for a while.

"I'd reverse the usual process, Mac," I said. "Usually the teacher begins with Chaucer and works forward to Dickens; I would begin with Comic Cuts and Dead-wood Dick and work back to Chaucer."

"Oh, do be serious for once," he said impatiently.

"I am quite serious, Mac," I said. "The only thing that matters in school work is interest, and I know from experience that the child is interested in Comic Cuts but not in the Canterbury Tales. My job is to encourage the boy's interest in Comic Cuts."

I ignored Macdonald's reference to idiocy, and went on.

"You see, Mac, what you do is this: you see a boy reading Dead-wood Dick, and you take his paper away from him and possibly whack the little chap for wasting his time. But you don't kill his interest in penny dreadfuls, and the result is that in later years he reads the Sunday paper that supplies the most lurid details of murders and outrages. My way is to encourage the lad to devour tales of blood and thunder so that in a short time blood and thunder have no more interest for him. The reason why most of the literature published to-day is tripe is that the public likes tripe, and it likes tripe because its infantile interest in tripe was suppressed in favour of Chaucer and Shakespeare."

"But," cried Mac, "isn't Shakespeare better for him than tripe?"

"Yes and no. If every poet were a Shakespeare the world would be a dull place; you need the tripe to form a contrast. The best way to enjoy the quintessence of roses, Mac, is to take a walk through the dung-heaps first."

"What books would you advise your pupils to read?" asked Mac.

"In their proper sequence . . . Comic Cuts, Deadwood Dick, John Bull,
Answers, Pearson's Weekly, Boy's Own Paper, Scout, Treasure Island,
King Solomon's Mines, White Fang, The Call of the Wild, The Invisible
Man, practically anything of Jack London, Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle,
Kipling."

"And serious literature?"

"All literature is serious, Mac."

"I mean Dr. Johnson, Swift, Bunyan, Milton, Dryden, and that lot," said
Mac.

I smiled.

"Mac, I want you to answer this question: have you read Boswell's Life of Johnson?"

"Extracts," he admitted awkwardly.

"Bunyan's Life and Death of Mr. Badman?"

"No."

"Milton's Areopagitica?"

"Er—no."

"Swift's Tale of a Tub?"

"No."

I sighed.

"Would you like to read them?" I asked.

"I don't think they would interest me," he admitted.

"Then in heaven's name, why expect children to have any interest in them? If these classics weren't shoved down children's throats the adult population of this country would be sitting of an evening reading and enjoying Milton instead of John Bull."

Mac would not have this.

"Children must read the classics so that they may get a good style," he said.

"Style be blowed!" I cried. "The only way to get a style is by writing. Mac, I should cut out all the lectures about Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare, and let the children write during the English period . . . if I had periods, which I wouldn't. I don't want style from kiddies; I want to see them create in their own way. If they are free to create they will form their own style."

In a conversation one always has a tendency to overstate a case, and as the argument went on I found myself saying wild things. Writing calmly now I still hold to my attitude concerning style. I love a book written in fine style, but I refuse to impose style on children. In every child there is a gigantic protest. Thus the son of praying parents often turns out to be a scoffer. I had a good instance of the danger of superimposition of style.

I had a class of boys and girls of fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen years of age. For one period a week we all wrote five minute essays, and then we read them out. Sometimes we would make criticisms; for instance one girl used the word "beastly" in a serious essay, and we all protested against it. Then one day the head-master decided that they should write essays for him. He set a serious subject—The Function of Authority, I think it was—and then he went over their books with a blue pencil and corrected their spelling and style.

Three days later my English period came round. I entered the room and found the class sitting round the fire.

"Hullo!" I said, "aren't you going to write?"

"No," growled the class.

"Why not?"

"Fed up with writing. We want to talk about economics or psychology."

A fortnight later they made an attempt to write short essays, but it was a miserable failure; all the joy in creation had been killed by that blue pencil.

I can give an example of the other way, the only way. One boy of fifteen hated writing essays, and when I began the five minute essay game he sat and read a book. After a time I gave out the subject "Mystery," and I saw him look up quickly with flashing eyes.

"Phew! What a ripping subject!" he cried, "I must have a shot at that!"

His shot was promising, and he continued to make shots, until some of his essays were praised by the class. Then one day he came to me.

"I don't know anything about stops and things," he said, "and I want you to tell me about them."

This is my ideal of education; no child ever learns a thing until he wants to learn it. That lad picked up all he wanted to know about stops in half-an-hour. He was interested in stops because he wanted to write better essays. I need hardly say that he had listened to hundreds of lessons on stops during his school career.

* * * * *

To-morrow I return to London, and to-night I went over to say good-bye to Dauvit.

"Aye, dominie, and so ye're gaein' back to London!" he said.

"I don't want to leave this lazy life, Dauvit," I said, "but I must go back and start my school."

"It'll cost ye some bawbees to gang to London," put in Jake Tosh.
"Penny three ha'pennies a mile noo-a-days I onderstand."

"A shullin' a mile for corps," remarked the undertaker.

Dauvit chuckled.

"So ye'll better no dee in London, dominie," he laughed.

"And that reminds me of Peter Wilson, him that passed into the Civil Service and gaed to London. He came hame onexpectedly wan mornin' and his father he says: 'What in a' the earth brocht ye hame in the month o' February, Peter? Surely ye dinna hae a holiday the noo?'

"'No,' says Peter, 'but I had a cauld and I thocht I was maybe takkin' pewmonia, and, weel father, corpses is a bob a mile on the railway.'"

"Dauvit," I said, "I don't care where I am buried."

"Is that so?" asked Jake in surprise. "What's become o' yer patriotism, dominie? I canna onderstand a man no wanting to be buried in his ain country. For my pairt I wudna like to be buried ony place but the wee kirkyaird up the brae there."

Dauvit grunted.

"What does it matter, Jake, whaur ye're buried?"

"Goad," said Jake, "it matters a lot. The grund up in the kirkyaird is the best grund in Scotland. It's a' sand, and they tell me that yer corp will keep for years in that grund."

Dauvit laughed, but the others seemed to take Jake's preservation argument seriously.

"Jake," said Dauvit, "does it no strike ye that to be buried in yer native place is a disgrace?"

"Hoo that, na?" said Jake.

"Because the man that bides in the place he was born in is of nae importance. A' the best men leave their native village, aye, and their native country. Aye, lads, the best men and the worst women leave their native country."

"I sincerely trust that you are not insinuating that they leave together, Dauvit," I put in hastily.

"No, they dinna do that, dominie; but whether they meet in London I dinna ken," and he smiled wickedly.

Jake spat in the grate.

"I dinna see what the attraction o' London is," he said with a touch of contempt.

"It is rather difficult to describe," I said. "For one thing you feel that you are in the centre of things. You are in the midst of all the best plays and concerts and processions . . . and you never think of going to see them. Then all the important people are there, the King and Lloyd George and Bernard Shaw . . . but you never see them anywhere. Then there are the places of historic interest, the Tower, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's . . . and you don't know where they are until your cousins come up for a week's trip, and then you ask a policeman where the Tower is. And the strange thing is that you get to love London."

"There will be a fell puckle funerals I daresay," said the undertaker.

"To tell the truth," I answered, "I have never seen a funeral in
London. In the suburbs, yes, but never in the centre of the West End.
I've often seen them at the crematorium in Golders Green."

The undertaker frowned.

"That crematin' business shud be abolished by act o' Parliament," he said gruffly. "It's just a waste o' guid wood and coal. They tell me it taks twa ton o' coal ilka time."

I was surprised to find that the broad-minded Dauvit agreed with the undertaker in condemning cremation. I suspect that early training has something to do with it, and there may be an unconscious connecting of cremation with hell-fire. Dauvit's argument that cremation would destroy the evidence in poisoning cases was a pure rationalisation.

I wondered why the topic of funerals kept coming up, and I laughingly put the matter to Dauvit.

"Maybe it's because we're sad because ye're gaein' awa," he said half-seriously. "We'll miss yer crack at nichts."

At last I got up to go.

"Aweel, Dauvit, I'll be going," I said.

"Aweel, so long," said Dauvit without looking up. The others said "Guidnicht" or "So Long," and I went out. I was sorry to leave these good friends, and they were sorry to lose me; yet we parted, it may be, for years, just as if we were to see each other to-morrow. We are a queer race.