pedagogic methods--"Happy Families"--An instructive game--Bermuda--A
waterless island--A most inviting archipelago--Bermuda the most
northern coral-atoll--The reefs and their polychrome fish--A
"water-glass"--Sea-gardens--An ideal sailing place-How the Guardsman
won his race--A miniature Parliament--Unfounded aspersions on the
Bermudians--Red and blue birds--Two pardonable mistakes--Soldier
gardeners--Officers' wives--The little roaming home-makers--A pleasant
island--The inquisitive German Naval Officers--"The Song of the
Bermudians."


The crass ignorance of the average Englishman about geography is
really appalling. He neither knows, nor wants to know, anything about
it, and oddly enough seems to think that there is something rather
clever about his dense ignorance. This ignorance extends to our
statesmen, as we know by the painful experience of some of our
treaties, which can only have been drawn up by men grossly ignorant of
the parts of the world about which they were supposed to be
negotiating. I quite admit that geography is almost ignored in our
schools, and yet no branch of knowledge can be made so attractive to
the young, and, taught in conjunction with history, as it should be,
none is of higher educational value. At the request of two clerical
friends, I gave some geography lessons last year to the little boys in
their schools. My methods were admittedly illegitimate. In the course
of the last fifteen years I have sent hundreds of coloured
picture-postcards of places all over the world, in Asia, Africa,
Europe and America, to a small great-nephew of mine, now of an age
when such things no longer appeal to him. Armed with my big bundle of
postcards, and with another parcel as well, I tackled my small pupils.
I never spoke of them of a place without showing them a set of views