to ask, some relating to his new duties, and some, perhaps,
implying a degree of curiosity not very unnatural under the
circumstances. The truth is, the general effect of the schoolroom, with
its scores of young girls, all their eyes naturally centring on him with
fixed or furtive glances, was enough to bewilder and confuse a young man
like Master Langdon, though he was not destitute of self-possession, as
we have already seen.

You cannot get together a hundred girls, taking them as they come, from
the comfortable and affluent classes, probably anywhere, certainly not in
New England, without seeing a good deal of beauty. In fact, we very
commonly mean by beauty the way young girls look when there is nothing to
hinder their looking as Nature meant them to. And the great schoolroom
of the Apollinean Institute did really make so pretty a show on the
morning when Master Langdon entered it, that he might be pardoned for
asking Miss Darley more questions about his scholars than about their
lessons.

There were girls of all ages: little creatures, some pallid and
delicate-looking, the offspring of invalid parents,--much given to books,
not much to mischief, commonly spoken of as particularly good children,
and contrasted with another sort, girls of more vigorous organization,
who were disposed to laughing and play, and required a strong hand to
manage them; then young growing misses of every shade of Saxon
complexion, and here and there one of more Southern hue: blondes, some of
them so translucent-looking that it seemed as if you could see the souls
in their bodies, like bubbles in glass, if souls were objects of sight;
brunettes, some with rose-red colors, and some with that swarthy hue
which often carries with it a heavily-shaded lip, and which, with pure
outlines and outspoken reliefs, gives us some of our handsomest
women,--the women whom ornaments of plain gold adorn more than any other
parures; and again, but only here and there, one with dark hair and gray
or blue eyes, a Celtic type, perhaps, but found in our native stock
occasionally; rarest of all, a light-haired girl with dark eyes, hazel,
brown, or of the color of that mountain-brook spoken of in this chapter,
where it ran through shadowy woodlands. With these were to be seen at
intervals some of maturer years, full-blown flowers among the opening
buds, with that conscious look upon their faces which so many women wear
during the period when they never meet