depression in the dispersion of a great party; the house seems so
strangely silent, the rooms seem so strangely empty, servants flitting
noiselessly here and there, a dropped flower, a fallen jewel, an
oppressive scent from multitudes of fading blossoms, a broken vase
perhaps, or perhaps a snapped fan--these are all that are left of the
teeming life crowded here one little moment ago. Though one may be glad
they are gone, yet there is a certain sadness in it. "_Le lendemain de
la fete_" keeps its pathos, even though the _fete_ itself has possessed
no poetry and no power to amuse.

* * *

In every one of her villages she had her schools on this principle, and
they throve, and the children with them. Many of these could not read a
printed page, but all of them could read the shepherd's weather-glass in
sky and flower; all of them knew the worm that was harmful to the crops,
the beetle that was harmless in the grass; all knew a tree by a leaf, a
bird by a feather, an insect by a grub.

Modern teaching makes a multitude of gabblers. She did not think it
necessary for the little goat-herds, and dairymaids, and foresters, and
charcoal-burners, and sennerins, and carpenters, and cobblers, to study
the exact sciences or draw casts from the antique. She was of opinion,
with Pope, that "a little learning is a dangerous thing," and that a
smattering of it will easily make a man morose and discontented, whilst
it takes a very deep and lifelong devotion to it to teach a man content
with his lot. Genius, she thought, is too rare a thing to make it
necessary to construct village schools for it, and whenever or wherever
it comes upon earth, it will surely be its own master.

She did not believe in culture for little peasants who have to work for
their daily bread at the plough-tail or with the reaping-hook. She knew
that a mere glimpse of a Canaan of art and learning is cruelty to those
who never can enter into and never even can have leisure to merely gaze
on it. She thought that a vast amount of useful knowledge is consigned
to oblivion whilst children are taught to waste their time in picking up
the crumbs of a great indigestible loaf of artificial learning. She had
her scholars taught their "ABC," and that was all. Those who wished to
write were taught, but writing was not enforced. What they were made to
learn was the name and use of every plant in their own country; the
habits and ways of all animals; how t