Page:English as we speak it in Ireland - Joyce.djvu/177

 162 brains out after he's gone away!' That visit passed off in great style.

These elementary teachers, or 'hedge teachers,' as they were commonly called, were a respectable body of men, and were well liked by the people. Many of them were rough and uncultivated in speech, but all had sufficient scholarship for their purpose, and many indeed very much more. They were poor, for they had to live on the small fees of their pupils; but they loved learning—so far as their attainments went—and inspired their pupils with the same love. These private elementary schools gradually diminished in numbers as the National Schools spread, and finally disappeared about the year 1850.

These were the schools of the small villages and hamlets, which were to be found everywhere—all over the country: and such were the schools that the Catholic people were only too glad to have after the chains had been struck off—the very schools in which many men that afterwards made a figure in the world received their early education.

The elementary schools of the towns were of a higher class. The attendance was larger; there were generally desks and seats of the ordinary kind; and the higher classes were commonly taught something beyond Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic; such as Grammar, or Book-keeping, with occasionally a spice of Euclid, Mensuration, Surveying, or Algebra.

It very often happened that the school took its prevailing tone from the taste of the master; so that the higher classes in one were great at Grammar, those of another at Penmanship, some at Higher