existence.

In the end, I advanced so far as to give some lectures in geometry, and
this too produced a happy moral developement.

Lessons in music formed part of our evening employment, and those being,
like geography, a sort of amusement, they were regularly succeeded by
grave and edifying reading, and by such reflections as I took care to
suggest for their improvement.

Most of the young adults of the village were present at such lessons, as
were within the reach of their comprehension, and as the children had a
separate instructor, the young women and girls of Dormilleuse, who were
growing up to womanhood, were now the only persons for whom a system of
instruction was unprovided. But these stood in as great need of it as
the others, and more particularly as most of them were now manifesting
Christian dispositions. I therefore proposed that they should assemble
of an evening in the room, which the children occupied during the day,
and I engaged some of my students to give them lessons in reading and
writing. We soon had twenty young women from fifteen to twenty-five
years of age in attendance, of whom two or three only had any notion of
writing, and not half of them could read a book of any difficulty. While
Ferdinand Martin was practising the rest of my students in music, I
myself and two of the most advanced, by turns, were employed in teaching
these young women, so that the whole routine of instruction went on
regularly, and I was thus able to exercise the future schoolmasters in
their destined profession, and both to observe their method of teaching,
and to improve it. I thus superintended teachers and scholars at the
same time.