The first school in North Sydenham, of which there is positive mention, was a private one conducted by Mr. Henry Baker at his home on Concession B, Lot 35, for one summer. It has been impossible to place the exact year, but it was in 1845 or 1846, probably in 1846.

If the reader objects to equivocal statements such as “as nearly as can be ascertained” or “as far as is known,” he will find parts of this narrative very unsatisfactory reading, and this is one of them. But such phrases, which are well considered as being in bad taste by the best writers, are excusable in this case if they are excusable at all. It should be remembered that there are now no living witnesses of the events prior to 1848 in Sydenham, either there or elsewhere. If there are any documents bearing on these events it has been impossible to find them. All one can do is to trust such written recollections as the pioneers, long years after the events happened, jotted down, and have left behind them.

Mr. Baker was an easy going man, and as a disciplinarian ranked considerably below par. His methods were informal in the extreme. A true story survives about a little girl who, while a session was in progress, walked up and turning her back to him said, “Claw my back—it’s itchy.”

However, as has been previously noted, a log school house was erected at Annan in the summer of 1847, and it served as church and school until 1853, when the first church was built. It was also the community centre of the period, although the builders would never have dreamed of calling it by such a latter day title. There is no record of how it was built, what was its cost, or any such details. Probably some of the surrounding settlers gathered and ran it up in a day or two. This building and its immediate successor, a more pretentious frame one, have long since disappeared in the ceaseless changes of Time. But the first log building became famous in its day as the only school nearer than those of Owen Sound for children of school age to be sent to within a radius that included Leith, the Irish Block and a remote point on the north-east end of the Lake Shore Line. The school district, shortly after this date, became known as School Section Number 3, Lake Shore line of Sydenham.

The same year, Messrs. David Armstrong and Andrew Bigger communicated with William Telford, a gentleman who was at that time teaching school in Dumfries township, Waterloo county, with a view to engaging him in the same capacity in the new school. Mr. Telford, who had taught school in Roxburgshire previous to his coming to Canada, accepted their proposals, and with his family came to the Lake Shore Line late in the fall of 1848. He brought with him a stove to be used in the Annan school, charging the section ten shillings for the service.

There is an old saying to the effect that a note made on the spot and at the time is worth a thousand recollections. Mr. Telford was a careful and methodical man who kept a minute record of all his transactions, accounts, etc., in connection with his duties as school teacher in School Section Number 3, from the date on which the school opened until his retirement in August, 1856, owing to ill health. Many of these ledgers and ac—137— count books have been kindly loaned us, and the task of the recorder becomes accordingly easy and definite. These books are also valuable as showing accurately the prices of various commodities at the time, of which notice will be taken later on.

On the morning of March 5th, 1849, then, the school opened without any ceremonies and with the following pupils in attendance, or who subsequently commenced attendance in the same year: James Wilson, William Armstrong, John Armstrong, William Nesbit, Betsey Nesbit* Isabella Nesbit, Mary Telfer, William Telford, James Telford, Isabella Telford (these last three being of the teacher’s own family) Mary Telfer, Christina Reid, Thomas J. Wilson, Hannah Keefer, Francis Keefer, Agnes Lamb, Gideon Telfer, James S. Wilson, Bridget Wilson, Isabella Pliddell, Isabella Easton, John Ross, Hugh Ross, Margaret Jamieson, Agnes Jamieson, Helen Jamieson, James Wilson, Walter Wilson, David Ross, Mary MacFarland, Jessie Mac-Farland, Christina MacCallum, Archie MacCallum, Helen Taylor, John Cathrae, Andrew Beard, Jane Torrence, John Wilson, Arthur Branscombe, James Branscombe, Henry Taylor, Louise Stewart, Thomas Stewart, Donald MacKay, James MacKay, George Riddell, Jane Telfer, Benjamin Cameron, Rhoda Cameron, James Thomson, Alexander Thomson and Peter MacCallum.

With hardly one exception these children had been born in Scotland, born in Canada of parents coming from Auld Scotia, or were of Scottish extraction in some degree. From their conversation, we are told, one would have imagined himself back in a school house in Dumfries, Ayr or Roxburghshire. Dr. Johnston once said the Lowland Scottish dialect was the sorriest jargon into which the English language had ever been twisted. No doubt he had taken something for breakfast that disagreed with him, and was in an unusually savage temper at the time, even for such a choleric gentleman as the learned Samuel. His temper would not have improved had he been compelled to teach school at Annan in the early fifties.

The attendance steadily swelled. In 1850 seventy-three pupils attended the Annan school at one time or another; in 1851, ninety-nine; in 1852, ninety-three; in 1853. one hundred and three; in 1854, ninety-four and in 1855, one hundred and five. Many of these pupils came from outside the school section proper. Mr. Telford had achieved enviable notoriety as a teacher, and schools were scarce in the new settlements. The pupils coming from a long distance were known as side scholars, and a list of such scholars for the year 1853 is in evidence: William Doyle, Robert Hatton, John Hatton, Richard Alexander, Matthew Alexander, James MacKay, William Dunn, Edwin Dunn, Ann MacKenzie, John MacKenzie, Alex MacKenzie, Alex MacLean, Catherine Doyle, Margaret Alexander, Charles Conner, John MacLaren, John, Michael and Thomas Horan, Bryan Tray nor, Thomas Tray nor, Edward Godfrey, John Traynor and William Howie. There is such a strong Hibernian flavor about some of these latter names that one begins to suspect the Scottish preserves were being poached upon by their Irish neighbors.

Attendance was much better in the winter than in the summer months. In summer the farmer lads were too busy logging, branding and burning to find time for schooling. But whenever they could be spared from work, the school was the first place they were sent to. Many of the fathers of these boys had had superior educational advantages in the Old Land but the hope that “springs perennial in the human breast,” that of bettering their material condition, had brought them to a new one, where one of their few regrets was the advantages they had enjoyed could not be bestowed upon their children. The average attendance in 1850 was 33 and in 1851 it was 46. In 1852 the summer average was 38 and the following winter 54, after which no further notice appears of averages, for some reason. But judging from the number attending at some time in the year there must have been certain days in the early winter when eighty or eighty-five scholars crowded the log school. Mr. Telford sometimes called on the services of his eldest daughter. Miss Margaret Telford, as assistant. He was totally unlike the aforementioned gentleman, Henry Baker, in every respect save that of a very considerable learning. Discipline was his middle name. Many touching treatises have been written, both before that time and since, upon the efficacy of moral suasion, and the power of kindness in enforcing obedience among children. Doubtless Mr. Telford had read many of them, and given what he had read calm and unbiased consideration. These to the contrary notwithstanding, he still leaned decidedly to the belief that his strong right arm with a stout strap at the end of it had all such methods faded to a sickly pallor. In everything the most careful and painstaking of men, when he had finished a lesson in discipline not the smallest detail had been neglected in making the impression of that lesson both painful and lasting. Many a young Scottish Canadian, as he lifted up his voice in anguished lamentations and shed bitter tears of poignant regret, testified to the fact that, in a very literal sense, the lesson had touched him in his tenderest spot. In short. Mr. Telford was known as a “tickler with the tawse.” In after years, however, when time had softened the asperities that al—140— ways follow such interviews between master and pupil, these same youngsters, grown to man’s estate, were fain to admit that the dominie’s methods were salutary and had been for their good.

The school system of that day must have been complicated. There were half a dozen accounts to keep on every individual scholar. Thus, they were required to furnish one quarter cord of cordwood each, delivered at the school, to the fuel supply. The most minute accounts were kept of attendance, both in weeks and days, as the teacher’s salary, supplemented by a grant from the government, was paid by a tax levied on each pupil, according to the days he had spent at school. It is almost pathetic to notice the scant number of weeks of schooling some pupils, who afterwards rose to positions of trust and responsibility in the township and county, received. One • of them, who in time became a highly successful contractor and builder, has a total attendance in all these years of seven weeks to his credit. The government grant seems to have been the only money received in a lump sum by Mr. Telford. We find by an entry under date of December 3Sth, 1850, he received the sum of twelve pounds, fourteen shillings and two pence from David Armstrong as part of this grant; on December 21st, 1853, by legislative grant from Thomas Lunn, fourteen pounds and tenpence; on August 25th, 1854, from James Ross, by the same source, fifteen pounds, and on August 21st, 1855, eighteen pounds, fifteen shillings from the same gentleman. These are a few of many items of the same nature.

For the tuition fees charged pupils Mr. Telford was in many cases paid in kind, or in labor performed by their parents. On January 12th, 1850, James Ross paid him one hundred and thirty pounds of beef at three-and-one half cents, and one hundred and four pounds of pork at four cents per pound, on his school account. In 1849 William Riddell contributes one day logging, one and one half days barn raising, four and one half days carpenter work, and so on to the equivalent of one pound, sixteen shillings and tenpence, for the same purpose. William Lamb is credited with six pounds, ten-and-one-half shillings for logging; Robert Easton with sixteen shillings ten-and-one-half pence for use of oxen, logging, digging, etc., and again, James Ross and his son Andrew, six shillings and threepence for logging and building. George Nesbit has sixteen shillings and twopence credited to him in a long account; James Wilson eleven shillings and threepence; David Armstrong, one pound, twelve shillings and ninepence, Walter Aitkin, one pound, one shilling and three pence, and so on, until the list must have included almost every parent in the section. All worked out their tuition expense accounts when Mr. Telford gave them the chance, and as he was part farmer, owning fifty acres, these chances were frequent. Ready cash was desperately scarce at that time. Some of the accounts bespeak the Scottish customs of the period. In 1849 we find Mr. Alex MacFarland, who kept store at Grady’s Corners, credited with twelve window glasses, one half pound green tea, one half pound tobacco, one pound saleratus, two and one half gallons of whiskey, the last item for seven shillings and sixpence, and another quart of whiskey at ninepence the quart. There is this much to be said for the whiskey so purchased, that it was good liquor; not the rotten poison illegally peddled by bootleggers under a prohibitory law.

In 1849, Mr. Telford’s salary is given at sixty pounds per annum at four dollars in the pound. This salary was continued until 1855, when it was raised to seventy-five pounds and rested at that figure until his retirement in 1856. He had a little income from his fifty acres, possibly the poorest farm on the Lake Shore Line. When we reflect that from this meagre salary, largely paid in services performed, he sent his aged father in Scotland the sum of four pounds annually until that gentleman’s death in 1853, we have some insight into his moral fibre. He had previously done the same thing while at Galt. The Scottish emigrants of that time might resent any interference, moral or legal, with what they ate and drank, but many of them were examples of a filial respect which has not been so noticeable in later times.

It may be noted in an aside here that the farm Mr. Telford lived on, about three-quarters of a mile south-east of Annan, was the homestead originally taken up by Martin Deacon, Esq. Under date of June 22nd, 1849, Mr. Telford pays Thomas Gordon, coroner, of Owen Sound, the sum of fifteen pounds in full settlement of all claims and the improvements Mr. Deacon had made on it, house, clearings, etc. This man was one of those strange anomalies sometimes found in the frontier settlements — an English gentleman of rare culture and breeding. He was a keen sportsman and made his living partially by his rifle. He was found dead in the house Mr. Telford moved into on coming to the Lake Shore Line from Galt, the appearance of the corpse being strongly suggestive that he had been the victim of ill treatment, if not positive foul play. Mr. Thomas Gordon was administrator of the deceased’s affairs.

There were other men like Mr. Deacon among the pioneers, men of talent and unusual promise in their younger years, whose lives were tragically wasted in a new land. Among them was Henry Baker. Before coming to Canada Mr. Baker, who was of an old and eminently respectable English family, had served an apprenticeship in one of the largest banking establishments in Paris. He was an accomplished linguist and spoke French fluently, and with the proper accent. On the same farm where he kept a private school at his residence, he built a large log brewery He was a steady and reliable customer of his own manufactured wares, however, and the new industry was soon discarded. He moved to Owen Sound and taught French in the schools there. Thus from one occupation he drifted to another, pursued constantly by a fatal weakness and lack of self control that rendered nugatory all his naturally fine gifts. He died at last, about forty-five years ago, in a condition worse than pauperism, and was only given decent burial through the kindness of a friend of former years, who has asked that his name be withheld. He lies in an unmarked and unknown grave in Greenwood cemetery at Owen Sound.

Sad is the fate of such men. In the twilight of their lives they must have many a sombre hour of the bitterest reflection. They have known men with not one half their talents or opportunities, but who by untiring industry and making the most of such chances as they had, raise themselves to positions of trust and authority, while they were wallowing in the slough of self indulgence and debauchery. And if in the world beyond an account must be rendered for these same talents, how shall they, remembering that to whom much is given of him shall the more be required, be prepared to answer for a barren and wasted career in the great final reckoning? Almost every community has had in its history, sooner or later, its own Sydney Carton, but few of these have had the opportunity to atone for the years in sinning wasted by a death of splendid selfsacrifice.

Among the names of scholars who attended in the later years of Mr. Telford’s regime are many that will stir the memories of those of a past generation who still sojourn among us. Some of these names are: Agnes Hark-ness, Alex Duffy, Abraham Cameron, John Michaelheron, Frances Ann Cameron, Arthur Cameron, William and David Glen, Daniel and Henry Taylor, Jessie and Mary Rutherford, Betsey and Robina Easton, Andrew, Thomas, Henry, Archie and Burnie Lang, Nancy and Peter Marshall, a certain David Pyette, who has the word “runagate” opposite his name, Jane Burford, John Ogilvie and a host of others. It should be borne in mind that in that early day young men of twenty to twenty-four years of age attended the pioneer schools, and even beards were not an unknown sight there.

Mr. Telford’s successor was William Speedie, who taught about one and a half years. He was followed by Mr. Telford’s eldest son, William P. Telford, who discharged the duties of the post more than ten years. In the early nineties a grandson, Robert Telford, taught the same school for one year, so Annan enjoys the unique distinction of having had three generations of one family as its school teacher. Will the family tradition still be maintained?

Turning now to educational matters in Leith, we will find the record much less satisfactory. Leith was much the larger village but it did not have the clientage to draw from. Annan had in the early days, in fact, labored under such appellations as Vanwyck’s Corner, Leith Corner, Speedieville and Dunedin, but such a rose under any other name would have smelled as sweet. The first school was conducted in a private house by Robert Grierson, in 1858. The children of school age, in Leith and vicinity, had hitherto gone up to Annan school. There are no written records extant of any of the proceedings in connection with Leith’s first school, and the human memory must again be relied upon. Here is a list of the first scholars given in such manner by one of themselves: John Henry, Janet Henry, Mary Duffy, Maggie Easton, Robert Glen, Jessie Glen, Mary Cameron, Frances Cameron, Jenny Cameron, Annie Burr, Willie Burr, James Burr, James Duffy, Peter Marshall, Nancy Marshall, Nettie Marshall, James Reid, Jessie Reid, Betsey Reid, Malcolm Rutherford, Betsey Turnbull, Janet Turnbull, Janet Easton, Robina Easton. In 1858 the second school house, a square structure of frame with cottage roof, was built, and this continued to do duty until 1875. By a freak of fortune it has long since disappeared, while the first school, a log build ing, is still standing, and has been remodeled into a comfortable dwelling house by Mr. Edmund Buzza, who at this writing occupies it. However, it must have cost many times its first value in repairs. Summer visitors will recognize it under the name of Buzzville. When the frame school was built in 1858 Mr. Grierson became its first teacher, at a salary a little over two hundred dollars per annum. In the seventeen years it served the section as a school house its four walls witnessed some of the stormiest scenes that ever transpired within a school house in Canada. However it came about, the boys who attended Leith school, many of them hulking young men, in the decade from 1865 until 1875, acquired a reputation for turbulence and unruly disorder that was far from enviable. Maybe their teachers did not understand them; it is certain that some of them took no pains to understand them. One of them long afterwards confessed that never for an instant did he so far forget himself as to turn his back to them. He faced them always, with his back to the wall and ready for a fight. Sometimes the master was openly defied. They had a game called shinny, an emasculated, or, more properly, brutalized, hockey, played with a stick much like a hockey stick, but cut from the stem of a sapling maple with a little half circle on the outer end. A matched game of shinny was always attended by a casualty list of lesser or greater length, according to the temper the players found themselves in. It was sometimes played on the ice, sometimes on terra firma, but it was always a hard and fast rule of the game that a player must “shinny on his own side,” which meant that one of the teams must play left-handed and the other right-handed. No generalship or combination play entered into it—only hard slugging and an ability to stand up to unlimited punishment. The sticks were usually about forty-two inches long, and a teacher one day conceived the idea that if the handles were cut in half the game might be humanized a little. The result was the very opposite from what he hoped. The edict went into force one morning and was rescinded next day. To use the shortened sticks it was found necessary to assume a crouching, stooped position, and consequently a player found it much easier to slug his opponent in the face. When the 'old order was reverted to one of the Scott boys came to school carrying a shinny that looked like a sleigh runner.

There was an old custom in those days known as ‘‘barring out.” No body knows how it originated or where it came from, but the preponderance of opinion seems to favor the idea that it was imported from Scotland. On the 21st of December, which was the day always chosen for some equally obscure reason, every scholar hurried to school at an early hour, to forestall the appearance of the teacher. The door was locked and barricaded and the windows fastened down securely. Thus the teacher was locked out but one sometimes wonders what would have happened had he stood on guard indefinitely, and so starved the pupils into letting him in. However, the customary course of events was that he appeared at the usual hour, made the appearance of being utterly dumbfounded, shook his fist furiously at the windows and made sham efforts at an entrance. Then he retired to the nearest store and sent down a big bag of candy for division among his rebellious pupils, and all went home for a holiday.

One year, however, the ending was not such a happy one. A Mr. MacKerroll was teaching and he, for some reason, was utterly in the dark as to the reason of this sudden eruption in the school. Another king had arisen who knew not Joseph. When he reached the school on that fateful morning and saw the scholars yelling derisively in the windows he never hesitated a moment. Walking up to one of them he smashed a pane with his fist, grasped a sash from the inside and pulled it out bodily. Then he vaulted in among the scholars in spite of a rain of blows, all aimed at his head. There ensued a painful scene which w'e will not linger upon. The scholars were soon beaten into submission, the ringleaders singled out, lined up in a row and given a hiding that those of them who survive have not forgotten from that day to this. The incident, at the moment, aroused considerable feeling as it was thought the teacher had been unduly severe, but the time arrived when both master and pupil looked back and laughed at it. Mr. MacKerroll died of tuberculosis about thirty years ago.

Mr. Grierson’s immediate successor was a Mr. Jones, a young Englishman who came up from Durham, and remained a little over a year. He was an enthusiastic athlete and sportsman, and is chiefly remembered for his skill as a cricketer. He made many friends while in the neighborhood but shortly after his return to Durham Tiis career was cut short by cancer. He was followed as teacher by the Moores, father and son. The elder Moore ruled with a stern hand and administered punishment in the old fashioned manner with his bare palm, and with the pupil laid across his knee. This resulted in an unlooked for denouement one day. The culprit up for punishment was young Tom Waters, later an amateur boxer who attained considerable celebrity, and now a flourishing business man in Des Moines. Tom was ever of a pugnacious disposition, and when the teacher’s heavy hand had descended once or twice he suddenly lashed out from his recumbent position and caught him on the jaw with his right foot. He then scooted for the door, ran all the way home and never came back.

After the Moore regime came Miss Brown, daughter in the home of an old Sydenham family, now the wife of a business man in Montreal, who taught for one year. She was followed by Robert Henry, a young teacher who had secured his certificate in a novel manner, and one that illustrates the scarcity of teachers at the time. Mr. Henry had come to Canada from Scotland with his father, a man of great natural ability who had had the advantage of a fine education in the Old Land. Learning of this his neighbors came to him and begged of him that he would consent to become the school teacher in their section. He preferred his new vocation of farming, however, and positively declined the request. “But,” he said, “here is my son Robert who shows great aptitude for such a task, in literary studies at least. He has no certificate, but possibly some arrangement could be made whereby he could teach your children.” So Robert went into Owen Sound and explained the situation to Thomas Gordon, then Superintendent of Schools for the district. This gentleman heard his story, gave his man an oral examination of two or three minutes duration, reached in his desk for a blank, and filled out a provisional third class certificate. He handed it to the youthful applicant, who taught school on the strength of it for over twenty years, and an excellent teacher he made too. He was a great admirer of his native country, its literature and music; a devoted student m all branches of history and well versed in all studies save mathematics. Of all the teachers who came either before or after him he paid the most attention to the moral training of his pupils, and more particularly on the temperance question, as he was a strong advocate of total abstinence. In politics he was a strong Liberal, and in the later years of his life, as one of the Sydenham stalwarts of the party, stood high in their councils in North Grey. A man of somewhat hasty temper, one is nevertheless safe in saying that no teacher who ever wielded the birch in Leith school is held in such affectionate remembrance as he by his many pupils, the survivors of whom, all now well past middle age, are scattered far and wide over this North American Continent. He died in 1896 while in his fifty-seventh year, and is buried at Leith.

Mr. Henry taught for two separate terms, the last one being from 1879 to 1882, inclusive. His successor after the first was Thomas Adair, of the well known stationers’ family in Owen Sound at that time. Then came Mr. MacKerroll, of barring out fame, who taught for one year. Mr. MacKenzie came next; in after years he rose to the mayoralty in North Bay and died in Sudbury, to which town he had removed as Collector of Customs.

One day in 1875, while Mr. MacKenzie was still teacher, the scholars gathered up books and slates, to many of them the emblems of their bondage, and marched up in a body to the new schoolhouse. There are grandparents now living in Sydenham and outside of it who well remember that moving day, as they were among these scholars. The new school was built by James MacNeil, who about fourteen years previously had crossed the border, fought through the Civil War there, and then returned to Leith to apprentice himself to the carpenter’s trade. There had been a vigorous battle in the school section as to whether the school should be of frame or brick construction, the frame at last winning out. It has done continuous duty since and its fiftieth anniversary falls in 1925, or next year, when these lines are written. This is an unusually long life for a frame building, and if walls could speak what moving tales would come from its four sides! When it was opened the average attendance in the winter months sometimes ran as high as eighty-five and ninety. In our own remembrance there were over seventy scholars attending in the winter of 1881-82. At the present time the attendance, alas! could almost be counted on the fingers of two hands. Nothing could be more eloquent of the gradual decay of a once flourishing rural district, in point of population. It is a matter for congratulation that all the scholars who left the old school abandoned in 1875 turned out excellent citizens wherever they made their abode, even if their behaviour while there did not promise such a deduction.

In succession to Mr. MacKenzie came Mr. Robinson, who taught in 1878. Then Mr. Henry came for his second regime. Daniel Day came in 1883 and taught until the end of 1888. A more diligent or conscientious teacher never stepped inside a school house. There is no more wearing task upon the nerves than school teaching and none by which one’s sense of justice may be more fairly estimated. Among the pupils taught by Mr. Day were many relatives of his own, but the most jaundiced eye could not discern any favors paid them. After leaving Leith he taught at Woodford and at Shallow Lake, forming a wide a circle of friends and acquaintances, and the news of his death in the Western Provinces a few years ago, a death followed less than a year later by that of his wife, was received with deep regret by them all. His eldest son met death at the hands of the Boers in the South African War, a sacrifice which has been almost forgotten in the long list of casualties coming home to Owen Sound and surrounding townships in the Great War.

A home product, in the person of Arthur Cameron, came to the same school he had quitted as a pupil a few years formerly, and taught for two years. This brings us down, in a manner of speaking, to modern times and the list will be pursued no farther. Among later teachers probably the best remembered will be the brothers Clark, coming from Toronto in the middle nineties, in direct succession, to the school. The elder, Thomas, or Tom as everyone called him, is now one of the head masters in the Normal School at London, and has written several important text books in his profession.

Our school days fall within the most impressionable period of our life, and we have all the future years vouchsafed us in which to review them. The Leith school was, in one particular, happily situated in the matter of sport. It is the only school between Owen Sound and Meaford found in such close contiguity to the bay, and in olden days this meant a lot to the youthful Leithonians gather-od there. It meant an unlimited field for skating in the winter and the best facilities for bathing and swimming in the summer months. As a consequence there were few among them of the hardier sex that could not swim at twelve years of age, if any. Life was for them one coi'~ tinuous round of acquatic joys while the swimming season lasted, and how they managed to make it last surpasses all human belief. Water so cold that they, in later life, would shrink from it as they would from the smallpox, had no terorrs for them then.

One of the games played by both boys and girls in the olden times was known as rounders. This was played in much the same style as baseball, but in a simplified form. The ball was lobbed instead of being thrown by the pitcher, and the catcher was known as a backstop. One of the rules was that if a player running between bases were struck by a ball thrown by one of the fielders, he was out, or in rounders vernacular, “dead.” Sometimes, if the ball were a hard one and the thrower a good strong boy of fifteen or sixteen, the runner was almost literally so. One things this game certainly did. It developed a throwing arm among some of the girls until they could shoot a ball in as straight and swift as any of the boys. Rounders always flourished in the spring months; it was seldom played after the summer holidays. Among other games, the very names of which will recall memories of long-past joys to many a silver haired sojourner in this vale of sorrows from Leith and Concession A were “Bull in the ring,” “Duck on the rock,” “Arbor down,” “Pompom pullaway” and “Bear in the bushes.” All these games have long since fallen into disuse.

The average rural school in Ontario is little like that of forty and fifty years ago. Teaching methods have improved, but there does not seem to be the zest in life now there was among pupils then. In the former period young men graduated from the common schools at about the same age as the young men of today graduate from the universities. The attendance steadily shrinks as the retired farmer finds his way to the cities, and the teacher’s salary steadily swells. Next we will have the consolidated school on a general scale, when the children of half a township will be housed within four walls. These are logical developments and in line with the tendency of the times but sometimes in contemplating them the schoolboy of former times heaves a long sigh and longs for the olden schooldays—“the days that are no more.”