“I have had a hard day.  Thirty pupil-teachers to examine in an inconvenient room, and nothing to eat except a biscuit which a charitable lady gave me.”

“This certainly has been one of the most uncomfortable weeks I ever spent.  Battersea is so far off, the roads so execrable, and the rain so incessant....  There is not a yard of flagging, I believe, in all Battersea.”

“Here is my programme for this afternoon:  Avalanches—­The Steam-Engine—­The Thames—­India-Rubber—­Bricks—­The Battle of Poictiers—­Subtraction—­The Reindeer—­The Gunpowder Plot—­The Jordan.  Alluring, is it not?  Twenty minutes each, and the days of one’s life are only three score years and ten.”

“About four o’clock I found myself so exhausted, having eaten nothing since breakfast, that I sent out for a bun, and ate it before the astonished school.”

“Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday I had to be at the Westminster Training School at ten o’clock; be there till half-past one, and begin again at two, going on till half-past six; this, with eighty candidates to look after, and gas burning most of the day, either to give light or to help to warm the room.”

“One sees a teacher holding up an apple to a gallery of little children, and saying:  ’An apple has a stalk, peel, pulp, core, pips, and juice; it is odorous and opaque, and is used for making a pleasant drink called cider.’”

“I sometimes grow impatient of getting old amid a press of occupation and labour for which, after all, I was not born....  The work I like is not very compatible with any other.  But we are not here to have facilities found us for doing the work we like, but to make them.”

Still, his work as an inspector might have been made more interesting and less irksome, if he had served under chiefs of more enlightened or more liberal temper, as may be inferred from some words uttered after his retirement—­

“To Government I owe nothing.  But then I have always remembered that, under our Parliamentary system, the Government probably takes little interest in such work, whatever it is, as I have been able to do in the public service, and even perhaps knows nothing at all about it.  But we must take the evil of our system along with the good.  Abroad probably a Minister might have known more about my performances; but then abroad I doubt whether I should ever have survived to perform them.  Under the strict bureaucratic system abroad, I feel pretty sure that I should have been dismissed ten times over for the freedom with which on various occasions I have exposed myself on matters of Religion and Politics.  Our Government here in England takes a large and liberal view about what it considers a man’s private affairs, and so I have been able to survive as an Inspector for thirty-five years; and to the Government I at least owe this—­to have been allowed to survive.”