33- Norivay and the Norwegians 



and the reading of writing, arithmetic, singing ; and, if 

 circnmstances permit, gymnastics and military exercises. 

 To these subjects the Board may, if it thinks fit, add 

 grammar, higlier geography, history and science, drawing, 

 surveying, and, for the girls, housework. 



Even with us in England, with our dense population, 

 and by consequence the comparatively small area of 

 our school districts, a certain amount of hardship is 

 entailed in country places by the distances which 

 children have to walk to attend the board schools. In 

 many parts of Germany, where the education-acts are 

 more strictly enforced than they are here, these hard- 

 ships are sensibly increased. I remember myself once, 

 in North Germany, stopping to rest at the lodge of a 

 keeper in one of the great royal forests, which are so 

 numerous in East and West Prussia, and in Posen. 

 The children of this keeper had every day to walk four 

 or five miles to school at the nearest town ; they had 

 to remain there the whole day, taking their dinner 

 with them, or buying it at a shop, between the morning 

 and afternoon school, with, perhaps, no sheltered place 

 in which to eat it. Then, summer and winter, they had to 

 trudge their four or five miles back through this dark and 

 intensely lonely pine forest. The father was a splendid 

 man (an old soldier, of course), and the children looked 

 charmingly healthy. But this discipline must have 

 been a severe trial, both of body and mind. 



In Norway, with its narrow valleys, its numberless 

 forests and uncultivated mountains, and its solitary 

 farmsteads, the difficulties and hardships of this kind 

 would be increased a hundredfold, if there were not 

 some way of meeting them. The only course that can 



