72 MATESHIP WITH BIRDS 



brightness, particularly in respect of the English 

 lessons. 



For a personal testimony, there remains with me 

 a strong impression left by a contrast in children 

 of two country schools in the same State, situated 

 respectively in "cow" country and a mining area. 

 No. 1 batch of youngsters, blessed with an open- 

 souled teacher, were as intelligent as any among 

 thousands with whom I have chatted, their smart- 

 ness at mental arithmetic coinciding, even har- 

 monising, with their cheerfully intelligent know- 

 ledge of the birds, the insects, and the flowers of 

 their district. And most of these children were 

 waifs, boarded out by the State to dairy farmers! 



In sharp, almost harrowing, contradistinction, 

 the elder children of a mining village but four miles 

 away showed a dulness approaching denseness. 

 Moreover, a distressingly large percentage of them 

 were cross-eyed due, I thought at random, to a 

 continual peering around the huge heap of tailings 

 which fronted the school. Indeed, the gravel 

 seemed to have eaten into souls ; wherefore teachers 

 and children had missed the call of the good green 

 Earth the invitation to Nature's play-parties, "the 

 sign of the joy of the Lord," as Masefield has it. 

 Only and here my point strengthens only the in- 

 fants of this school were bright, happy, and recep- 

 tive. Mullock heaps and troubled eyes have no 

 place in Fairyland, and (not to speak irreverently) 

 no need exists there for a Saviour to mix spittle 

 with earth and anoint the eyes of spiritually blind. 



All this recalls old Dr. John Brown on the de- 

 sirability of recreating the natural, healthy interest 



