Here, for instance, is the picture Miss Cobbe gives
us of one of the Bristol night-schools:

It was a wonderful spectacle to see Mary Carpenter sitting patiently
before the large school gallery in St. James's Back, teaching,
singing, and praying with the wild street-boys, in spite of endless
interruptions caused by such proceedings as shooting marbles at any
object behind her, whistling, stamping, fighting, shrieking out 'Amen'
in the middle of a prayer, and sometimes rising en masse and tearing
like a troop of bisons in hob-nailed shoes down from the gallery,
round the great schoolroom, and down the stairs, and into the street.
These irrepressible outbreaks she bore with infinite good humour.

Her own account is somewhat pleasanter, and shows that 'the troop of
bisons in hob-nailed shoes' was not always so barbarous.

I had taken to my class on the preceding week some specimens of ferns
neatly gummed on white paper. . . . This time I took a piece of coal-
shale, with impressions of ferns, to show them. . . . I told each to
examine the specimen, and tell me what he thought it was. W. gave so
bright a smile that I saw he knew; none of the others could tell; he
said they were ferns, like what I showed them last week, but he
thought they were chiselled on the stone. Their surprise and pleasure
were great when I explained the matter to them.

The history of Joseph: they all found a difficulty in realising that
this had actually occurred. One asked if Egypt existed now, and if
people lived in it. When I told them that buildings now stood which
had been erected about the time of Joseph, one said that it was
impossible, as they must have fallen down ere this. I showed them the
form of a pyramid, and they were satisfied. One asked if _all_ books
were true.

The story of Macbeth impressed them very much. They knew the name of
Shakespeare, having seen his name over a public-house.

A boy defined conscience as 'a thing a gentleman hasn't got, who, when a
boy finds his purse and gives it back to him, doesn't give the boy
sixpence.'

Another boy was asked, after a Sunday evening lecture on 'Thankfulness,'
what pleasure he enjoyed most in the course of a year. He replied
candidly, 'Cock-fightin', ma'am; there's a pit up by the "Black Boy" as
is worth anythink in Brissel.'

There is something a little pathetic in the attempt to civilise the rough
street-boy by means of the refining influence of ferns and fossils, and
it is difficult to help feeling that Miss Carpenter rather overestimated
the value of elementary education. The poor are not to be fed upon
facts. Even Shakespeare and the Pyramids are not sufficient; nor is
there much use in giving them the results of culture, unless we also give
them those conditions under which culture can be realised. In these
cold, crowded cities of the North, the proper basis for morals, using the
word in its wide Hellenic signification, is to be found in architecture,
not in books.

Still, it would be ungenerous not to recognise that Mary Carpenter gave
to the children of the poor not merely her learning, but her love.