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Then we walked, up sinister roads, or along communication trenches, to the fire-step in the front line, or into places like "Plug Street" wood and Kemmel village, and the ruins of Vermelles, and the lines by Neuve Chapelle the training-schools of British armies where always birds of death were on the wing, screaming with high and rising notes before coming to earth with the cough that killed... After hours in those hiding-places where boys of the New Army were learning the lessons of war in dugouts and ditches under the range of German guns, back again to the little white chateau at Tatinghem, with a sweet scent of flowers from the fields, and nightingales singing in the woods and a bell tinkling for Benediction in the old church tower beyond our gate.

Here, then, is a young soul, brought to the years of legal majority, furnished from his training-schools with such and such shining capabilities, and ushered on the scene of things to inquire practically, What he will do there?

"Why," asked Lord Ashburton in a lecture to the students of the Wolvesey training-schools, "why was one mother of a family a better economist than another? Why could one live in abundance where another starved? Why, in similar dwellings, were the children of one parent healthy, of another puny and ailing? Why could this labourer do with ease a task that would kill his fellow?

Where we still meet with the urbane tone of conversation, as in Varro's Satires and Cicero's Letters, it is an echo of the old fashion which was not yet so obsolete in Reate and Arpinum as in Rome. Germs of State Training-Schools

The government has under its immediate direction eighty-seven schools of the lowest grade, called kuttabs, and thirty-five of the higher grades, three secondary, two girls' schools, and ten schools for higher or professional education, the school of law, the school of medicine, with its pharmaceutical school and its school for nursing and obstetrics, polytechnic schools for civil engineers, two training-schools for schoolmasters, a school of agriculture, two technical schools, one training-school for female teachers, and the military school.

They were started as training-schools for boys who were to become officers in the French army. The one at Brienne was a bare and ugly-looking lot of buildings in the midst of trees and gardens, looking down toward the little River Aube, and near to the fine old chateau, or nobleman's house, built, a hundred years before Napoleon's day, by the last Count of Brienne.

Their shoes, too, are after the pattern of those which, we are told, are always worn by Florence Nightingale with a sole as broad as the foot they were made for, and fitted to the natural shape of the foot. The food, the sister said, at Kaiserwerth, as in all the training-schools, was "nourishing, but very simple." Such facts are worth noting.

Before leaving the syndicalists, I would call attention to a change that is coming over the spirit of some of their leaders, as regards immediate plans of action. Another syndicalist of influence has been advocating the establishment of training-schools for the workers, in preparation for the day when they are to take over the industries. Vocational instruction this upon the great scale!

They all have human traits and ways; let those be brought out their mirth, their joy, their curiosity, their cunning, their thrift, their relations, their wars, their loves and all the springs of their actions laid bare as far as possible; but I do not expect my natural history to back up the Ten Commandments, or to be an illustration of the value of training-schools and kindergartens, or to afford a commentary upon the vanity of human wishes.

What with the pilots already breveted, and the eleves, or pupils in the training-schools, there were quite enough of our compatriots to man the dozen airplanes in one escadrille. Every day somebody "had it absolutely straight" that we were to become a unit at the front, and every other day the report turned out to be untrue. But at last, in the month of February, our dream came true.