There used to be an expression much in vogue years ago that denoted the instruction of the juvenile-it was When I was a lad at school my head master, who was distinctly a man of notions, insisted upon the boys learning something about fires. In those days the appliances for extinguishing conflagrations (especially in the country) were of the simplest character. Felsted had no large town near it, within a radius of some six miles, and practically consisted of little more than the school. There was a village with a few shops, but the school overshadowed everything else with its handsome range of buildings, its chapel, its property in every direction. And the place, to the best of my belief, did not possess a fire engine. So when there was an alarm of fire in the neighbourhood (a not infrequent occurrence when quarter day was nigh in hard times, and farm labourers and their masters were discontented) we lads used to turn out and hurry to the site of the blaze under the direction of the masters. We used to form into a double row of water bearers, the two ends resting one on the bank of the nearest pond, one close to the blazing building. The buckets used to be passed from hand to hand full and returned