its idle dasher, which the Nancys and Phoebes, who have left their
comfortable places to the Bridgets and Norahs, used to handle to good
purpose; and the brown, shaky old spinning-wheel, which was running, it
may be, in the days when they were hinging the Salem witches.

Under the dark and haunted garret were attic chambers which themselves
had histories. On a pane in the northeastern chamber may be read these
names:

"John Tracy," "Robert Roberts," "Thomas Prince;" "Stultus" another hand
had added. When I found these names a few years ago (wrong side up, for
the window had been reversed), I looked at once in the Triennial to find
them, for the epithet showed that they were probably students. I found
them all under the years 1771 and 1773. Does it please their thin ghosts
thus to be dragged to the light of day? Has "Stultus" forgiven the
indignity of being thus characterized?

The southeast chamber was the Library Hospital. Every scholar should
have a book infirmary attached his library. There should find a
peaceable refuge the many books, invalids from their birth, which are
sent "with the best regards of the Author"; the respected, but
unpresentable cripples which have lost cover; the odd volumes of honored
sets which go mourning all their days for their lost brother; the
school-books which have been so often the subjects of assault and
battery, that they look as if the police must know them by heart; these
and still more the pictured story-books, beginning with Mother Goose
(which a dear old friend of mine has just been amusing his philosophic
leisure with turning most ingeniously and happily into the tongues of
Virgil and Homer), will be precious mementos by and by, when children and
grandchildren come along. What would I not give for that dear little