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An old-fashioned Chinese school opens about the sixteenth of the first moon, or month, and continues for the rest of the year. The teacher often goes home to attend feasts, weddings, birthdays or funerals; or when the rice is cut, so that he may get his share of the harvest from the family fields. In the third month he has to be away worshipping at the graves of his ancestors; and in the fifth month, when the dragon boats race each other, and on other festivals in the seventh, tenth and eleventh months he will probably go home for a day or two. Whenever the master is away, the boys play and idle in the streets, unless they have to help with the harvest or run messages for their parents. So you see, although they do not have regular Easter and summer holidays, they do not fare badly.

But such schools as this will soon be left only in country villages. In the larger cities pupils and teachers alike are giving up the old slow-going ways. In the Government schools the boys wear a uniform and look like young soldiers. The classes are distinguished by stripes, like those worn on their arms by privates, corporals, sergeants and so forth. You can tell the class a boy belongs to by looking at his arm. When a visitor enters the school a bell tinkles and all the boys stand up and touch their caps, as soldiers do when saluting an officer. Inspectors visit the new schools to see how masters and scholars are doing their work.