with obstinacy, and I may add, indeed, with unwillingness. I wish I could
persuade myself that our teacher had forgotten" (Sarah looked on this as
a masterpiece,--a good line of print, which says, as you see, really
nothing) "the afternoon which was so mortifying to all who were
concerned, when her appeal to our better selves, and to our educated
consciousness of what was due to a clergyman, and to the institutions of
religion, made it necessary for several of the young ladies to cross to
the village," (Sarah wished she could have said metropolis,) "and obtain
an interview with the Rev. Mr. Ingham."

And so the composition goes on. Four full pages there are; but you see how
they were gained,--by a vicious style, wholly false to a frank-spoken girl
like Sarah. She expanded into what fills sixteen lines on this page what,
as she expressed it in conversation, fills only five.

I hope you all see how one of these faults brings on another. Such is the
way with all faults; they hunt in couples, or often, indeed, in larger
company. The moment you leave the simple wish to say upon paper the thing
you have thought, you are given over to all these temptations, to write
things which, if any one else wrote them, you would say were absurd, as
you say these school-girls' "compositions" are. Here is a good rule of the
real "Nestor" of our time. He is a great preacher; and one day he was
speaking of the advantage of sometimes preaching an old sermon a second
time. "You can change the arrangement," he said. "You can fill in any
point in the argument, where you see it is not as strong as you proposed.
You can add an illustration, if your statement is difficult to understand.
Above all, you can

"Leave Out All The Fine Passages."