stairs, and played on the spacious lawns of that mossy, tree-shadowed
garden. In the orchard had assembled, besides the children, a group of
their ex-teachers--Miss Semple and her sister, the village dressmakers,
Miss Genet, the daughter at the post-office, and the two Miss
Mittens--well-behaved and well-instructed young persons whom Mr. Wiley's
predecessors had been pleased to employ, but for whom Mrs. Wiley found
no encouragement. She had the ordering of the school, and preferred
gentlewomen for her lay-sisters. She had them, and only herself knew
what trouble in keeping them punctual to their duty and in keeping the
peace amongst them. There was dear fat Miss Buff, who had been right
hand in succession to Mr. Fairfax, Mr. Roebuck and Mr. Hutton, who
adored supremacy, and exercised it with the easy sway of long usage; she
felt herself pushed on one side by that ardent young Irish recruit, Miss
Thusy O'Flynn, whose peculiar temper no one cared to provoke, and who
ruled by the terror of it with a caprice that was trying in the last
degree. Miss Buff gave way to her, but not without grumbling, appealing,
and threatening to withdraw her services. But she loved her work in the
school and in the choir, and could not bear to punish herself or let
Miss Thusy triumph to the extent of driving her into private life; so
she adhered to her charge in the hope of better days, when she would
again be mistress paramount. And the same did Miss Wort--also one of the
old governing body--but from higher motives, which she was not afraid to
publish: she distrusted Mr. Wiley's doctrine, and she feared that he was
inclined to truckle to the taste for ecclesiastical decoration
manifested by certain lambs of his flock who doted on private
theatricals and saw no harm in balls. She adhered to her post, that the
truth might not suffer for want of a witness; and if the rising
generation of girls in preposterous hats had taken her for their pattern
of a laborious teacher, true to time as the school-bell itself, Mrs.
Wiley's preference for young ladies over young persons would have been