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Abbott Ashton, hesitating to make his nightly plunge into the dust- clouds of learning, paused in the vestibule to take a peep at Grace. It always rested him to look at her; he meant to drink her in, as it were, to cool his parched soul, then make a dash at his stack of examination-papers.

"Guess the chances of my laddies!" he cried, forgetting what he had just said, and that there was a Tommy to bother him. "I tell you, sir, that's a matter on which I'm never deceived, I can tell the results so accurately that a wise Senatus would give my lot the bursaries I say they'll carry, without setting them down to examination-papers at all."

The American professor, then, is a teacher. Unless he is the fortunate occupant of an exceptionally favored chair, his chief, and even his sole, function in the college body is to teach, in the strictest sense of the term. He has to prescribe textbooks, assign and hear lessons, grade recitations, mark examination-papers, submit carefully prepared term and annual reports to the faculty.

This was due partly to the blighting influence of examination-papers set by men of sterile, conscientious brains, but partly to the terrible value set by British minds upon correct information.

"I should think the testimony of a man who doesn't scruple secretly to read examination-papers before they are set, ought not to stand for much." Brogten, as we have already mentioned, had revealed to him the secret of Kennedy's dishonour. This remark fell quite dead: Kennedy sat unmoved, and Mr Norton replied "Pray don't introduce your personal altercations here, Mr Bruce, on irrelevant topics.

There were no more examination-papers for Abbott to struggle with; but, like bees who spend the pleasantest weather in hardest work, he was laying up mathematical sweetness and psychological succulence against the day when he might become a professor at Yale or Harvard. Unthrifty Fran, on the contrary, was bent upon no mission of self- improvement.

It is difficult to determine the age of a native, as wrinkles and lines do not show on a dark skin. Dark skins have other advantages. One of the European Examiners of Calcutta University told me that there had been great trouble about the examination-papers. By some means the native students always managed to obtain what we may term "advance" copies of these papers.

Besides the church and the jail there are no public institutions in Baddeck to see on Sunday, or on any other day; but it has very good schools, and the examination-papers of Maud and her elder sister would do credit to Boston scholars even. You would not say that the place was stuffed with books, or overrun by lecturers, but it is an orderly, Sabbath-keeping, fairly intelligent town.

A friend of mine a graduate of Brown University was for several years a member of a board which corrected the examination-papers of Negro candidates for teachers' certificates in a certain Southern State where the school facilities for the Negro population are exceptionally good; but he confessed to me that repeatedly not a paper submitted deserved a passing mark, but the board was "simply compelled to grant certificates in order to provide teachers enough to go around."

Besides the church and the jail there are no public institutions in Baddeck to see on Sunday, or on any other day; but it has very good schools, and the examination-papers of Maud and her elder sister would do credit to Boston scholars even. You would not say that the place was stuffed with books, or overrun by lecturers, but it is an orderly, Sabbath-keeping, fairly intelligent town.