In the midst of Bumsteadville stands the Alms-House; a building of an
antic order of architecture; still known by its original title to the
paynobility and indigentry of the surrounding country, several of
whose ancestors abode there in the days before voting was a certain
livelihood; although now bearing a door-plate inscribed, "Macassar
Female College, Miss CAROWTHERS." Whether any of the country editors,
projectors of American Comic papers, and other inmates of the edifice in
times of yore, ever come back in spirit to be astonished by the manner
in which modern serious and humorous print can be made productive of
anything but penury by publishing True Stories of Lord BYRON and the
autobiographies of detached wives, maybe of interest to philosophers,
but is of no account to Miss CAROWTHERS. Every day, during school-hours,
does Miss CAROWTHERS, in spectacles and high-necked alpaca, preside over
her Young Ladies of Fashion, with an austerity and elderliness
before which every mental image of Man, even as the most poetical of
abstractions, withers and dies. Every night, after the young ladies have
retired, does Miss CAROWTHERS put on a freshening aspect, don a more
youthful low-necked dress--

As though a rose
Should leave its clothes
And be a bud again,--

and become a sprightlier Miss CAROWTHERS. Every night, at the same hour,
does Miss CAROWTHERS discuss with her First Assistant, Mrs. PILLSBURY,
the Inalienable Bights of Women; always making certain casual reference
to a gentleman in the dim past, whom she was obliged to sue for breach
of promise, and to whom, for that reason, Miss CAROWTHERS airily refers,
with a toleration bred of the lapse of time, as "Breachy Mr. BLODGETT."