The day's work was over, and it was late in the evening, when she sat
down, tired and faint, with a great bundle of girls' themes or
compositions to read over before she could rest her weary head on the
pillow of her narrow trundle-bed, and forget for a while the treadmill
stair of labor she was daily climbing.

How she dreaded this most forlorn of all a teacher's tasks! She was
conscientious in her duties, and would insist on reading every
sentence,--there was no saying where she might find faults of grammar or
bad spelling. There might have been twenty or thirty of these themes in
the bundle before her. Of course she knew pretty well the leading
sentiments they could contain: that beauty was subject to the accidents
of time; that wealth was inconstant, and existence uncertain; that virtue
was its own reward; that youth exhaled, like the dewdrop from the flower,
ere the sun had reached its meridian; that life was o'ershadowed with
trials; that the lessons of virtue instilled by our beloved teachers were
to be our guides through all our future career. The imagery employed
consisted principally of roses, lilies, birds, clouds, and brooks, with
the celebrated comparison of wayward genius to meteor. Who does not know
the small, slanted, Italian hand of these girls'-compositions, their
stringing together of the good old traditional copy-book phrases; their
occasional gushes of sentiment, their profound estimates of the world,
sounding to the old folks that read them as the experience of a bantam
pullet's last-hatched young one with the chips of its shell on its head
would sound to a Mother Cary's chicken, who knew the great ocean with all
its typhoons and tornadoes? Yet every now and then one is liable to be
surprised with strange clairvoyant flashes, that can hardly be explained,
except by the mysterious inspiration which every now and then seizes a
young girl and exalts her intelligence, just as hysteria in other
instances exalts the sensibility,--a little something of that which made