vi. 



ROUND THE INDIAN MUSfitlM. 



One forenoon during the Christmas week of the 

 year 18 a number of school-masters and Pandits 

 from the various Presidency districts had gathered 

 together at the Indian Museum, at the invitation 

 of Mr. VV. who had kindly undertaken to show them 

 round its galleries. Mr. W. was then an Inspec- 

 tor of schools in Bengal. He was a man of 

 wide experience and large sympathies. Teachers 

 and students all looked up to him as to their best 

 friend, and a friend he was in no conventional sense 

 of the term. He was deeply interested in the spread 

 of education in Bengal, and was always planning 

 schemes for improving the existing systems and remedy- 

 ing their defects* His methods were sometimes 

 original too. He had become painfully impressed with 

 the fact that the lower grade teachers and Pandits 

 excellent men many of them lived buried, as it were, 

 in the oblivion and obscurity of mofussil stations and 

 outlying villages, and were therefore practically isolated 

 from all progressive ideas of the world ; that there was no 

 enthusiasm in them, and that they worked more like 

 machines than like intelligent human beings conscious 

 of the great responsibilities which their position imposed 

 upon them. He had also noticed that being them- 

 selves deficient in the faculty of observation they failed 



