flanking a noble and beautiful river—­I was observing all this when a number of young men and maids came out of a high-school and unconsciously assumed possession of the street.  It was a great and impressive sight; it was a delightful sight.  They were so sure of themselves, the maids particularly; so interested in themselves, so happy, so eager, so convinced (without any conceit) that their importance transcended all other importances, so gently pitiful toward men and women of forty-five, and so positive that the main function of elders was to pay school-fees, that I was thrilled thereby.  Seldom has a human spectacle given me such exciting pleasure as this gave. (And they never suspected it, those preoccupied demigods!) It was the sheer pride of life that I saw passing down the street and across the badly laid tram-lines!  I had never seen anything like it.  I immediately desired to visit schools.  Profoundly ignorant of educational methods, and with a strong distaste for teaching, I yet wanted to know and understand all about education in America in one moment—­the 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 training-school for teachers; but at what point the school proper ended I never did learn.  It seems to me that if I had penetrated through seven more doors I should have reached Columbia University itself, without having crossed a definite dividing-line; and, anyhow, the circumstance was symbolic.