Little Pariahs
It is a subject of continuous interest to watch the urban children in their new environment. The actual organisers of the billeting in the villages necessarily see the worse side of the experiment and they have been disposed on the more irritating occasions to call the experiment a social failure. The reason is that there is a certain number of young rebels in every place ; and they become pariahs. No house- holder will keep them for more than a few days and quite half the time and energy of the good people, mostly women, who make themselves responsible for the billeting, is spent in finding successive homes for these little scoundrels. One of them on arriving announced that he was going to be a good boy, he was not going to break any windows. It was a high, if rather a negative, ideal. In those small villages where the town and country children are taught together the village schoolmasters and mistresses think well of their new pupils, but find them very much inferior to the country children in power of concentration. The sound of any neigh- bouring lesson utterly distracts them.
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