education that produced that superb stride and carriage in the street! I
failed, of course, in my desire--not from lack of facilities offered,
but partly from lack of knowledge to estimate critically what I saw, and
from lack of time. My experiences, however, though they left my mind
full of enigmas, were wondrous. I asked to inspect one of the best
schools in New York. Had I been a dispassionate sociological student, I
should probably have asked to inspect one of the worst schools in New
York--perhaps one of the gaunt institutions to be found, together with a
cinema-palace and a bank, in almost every block on the East Side. But I
asked for one of the best, and I was shown the Horace Mann School.

* * * * *

The Horace Mann School proved to be a palace where a thousand children
and their teachers lived with extreme vivacity in an atmosphere of ozone
from which all draughts and chilliness had been eliminated. As a
malcontent native of the Isle of Chilly Draughts, this attribute of the
atmosphere of the Horace Mann School impressed me. Dimensionally I found
that the palace had a beginning but no end. I walked through leagues of
corridors and peeped into unnumbered class-rooms, in each of which
children were apparently fiercely dragging knowledge out of nevertheless
highly communicative teachers; and the children got bigger and bigger,
and then diminished for a while, and then grew again, and kept on
growing, until I at last entered a palatial kitchen where some two dozen
angels, robed in white but for the moment uncrowned, were eagerly
crowding round a paradisiacal saucepan whose magic contents formed the
subject of a lecture by one of them. Now these angels were not cherubs;
they were full grown; they never would be any taller than they were; and
I asked up to what age angels were kept at school in America. Whereupon
I learned that I had insensibly passed from the school proper into a