CHEOPS IN CONNEMARA 



Education is a fine word, a word charged with 

 respectable associations. Whether pronounced as 

 here written, or in its other varieties of ejjication or 

 eddication, its weightiness is felt to be very gi'eat, 

 even if it is variously comprehended; indeed, it has 

 in this respect a position somewhat more assured 

 than religion. Coupled with the word national, it 

 has been much and skilfully bandied about the pages 

 of reviews, with a sound as of heaviest artillery, 

 wonderfully in contrast to the docile lispings or tearful 

 whinings of the daily task, whose present or future 

 purport is what all this noise is about. 



From the thunder of such conflicts the ordinary 

 ignoramus respectfully conceals himself, believing, 

 in common with a great many of his class, that such 

 things are generally settled for the best somehow 

 after the noise is over, and not trying overmuch to 

 realise where cause ends and effect begins in the 

 minds of school children. Certainly such questions 

 are far from the mind of one of this sort, who, on a 

 gloomy afternoon, takes his way into a solitude where 

 it would seem that education might wander as a 

 forlorn thing and find no resting-place. Wisdom 

 herself might cry to the surrounding desolation from 

 the outside car which is creeping along through it 

 in the teeth of a bullying blast from the Atlantic, 

 and catch no reply, or even echo of her summons. 



Moor or bog, it is hard to know which to call it; 

 a brown and billowy waste without any hint of 



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