was the name of it, but the young ladies of the Apollinean Institute were
very anxious that it should be called Crystalline Lake. It was here that
the young folks used to sail in summer and skate in winter; here, too,
those queer, old, rum-scented good-for-nothing, lazy, story-telling,
half-vagabonds, who sawed a little wood or dug a few potatoes now and
then under the pretence of working for their living, used to go and fish
through the ice for pickerel every winter. And here those three young
people were drowned, a few summers ago, by the upsetting of a sail-boat
in a sudden flaw of wind. There is not one of these smiling ponds which
has not devoured more youths and maidens than any of those monsters the
ancients used to tell such lies about. But it was a pretty pond, and
never looked more innocent--so the native "bard" of Rockland said in his
elegy--than on the morning when they found Sarah Jane and Ellen Maria
floating among the lily-pads.

The Apollinean Institute, or Institoot, as it was more commonly called,
was, in the language of its Prospectus, a "first-class Educational
Establishment." It employed a considerable corps of instructors to rough
out and finish the hundred young lady scholars it sheltered beneath its
roof. First, Mr. and Mrs. Peckham, the Principal and the Matron of the
school. Silas Peckham was a thorough Yankee, born on a windy part of the
coast, and reared chiefly on salt-fish. Everybody knows the type of
Yankee produced by this climate and diet: thin, as if he had been split
and dried; with an ashen kind of complexion, like the tint of the food he
is made of; and about as sharp, tough, juiceless, and biting to deal with
as the other is to the taste. Silas Peckham kept a young ladies' school
exactly as he would have kept a hundred head of cattle,--for the simple,
unadorned purpose of making just as much money in just as few years as
could be safely done. Mr. Peckham gave very little personal attention to
the department of instruction, but was always busy with contracts for