?" I asked.

He made an effort to concentrate his mind, then suddenly he laughed
shortly.

"Good Lord!" he cried, "that's my wife's name!"

I felt that I could not very well ask him anything further, but I
suspected that Wilson and his wife were not getting on well together.

* * * * *

Macdonald's self-government scheme has fizzled out. Yesterday his
scholars besought him to return to the old way of authority.

"They were fed up with looking after themselves," explained Mac to me.
"They were always trying each other for misdemeanours, and they got
sick of it."

I tried to explain to Mac why his attempt had failed. Self-government
always fails unless it is complete self-government. Mac was the
director and guide; it was he who decided the time-table; it was he who
rang the bell and decided the length of the intervals. The children
had nothing to do but to keep themselves in order, hence they came to
spy on each other. All their energies were directed to penal measures.
Their meeting degenerated into a police court. That was inevitable;
Mac, by laying down all the laws, prevented their using their creative
energy on things and ideas. Naturally they put all the energy they had
into the only thing open to them--the trial of offenders. In short,
they were employing energy in destruction when they ought to have been
employing it in construction. Mac seems indifferent now. "The thing
is unworkable," he says.

* * * * *

Duncan came over to-night. I decided to let him do most of the
talking, and he did it well. He has been doing a lot of Regional
Geography, and I learned much from his conversation. As the evening
wore on he became very affable, and he treated me with the greatest
kindness. When Mac was seeing him out Duncan remarked to him: "That
chap Neill isn't such a bad fellow after all." Now that I have shown
Duncan that I am his inferior in Geography he will listen to me with
less irritation.

After supper I went over to see Dauvit. His shop was crowded.
Conversation was going slowly, and Dauvit seemed to welcome my entrance.

"Man, Dominie," he said, "I am very glad to see ye, cos the smith here
has been tellin' his usual lees aboot the ten pund troot that he nearly
landed in the Kernet."

"I doot ye dreamt it, smith," said the foreman from Hillend. "I ken
for mysell that the biggest troot I ever catched were in my dreams."

"Dreams is