ement, he
recognized that there must be fidelity and intelligence somewhere among
the instructors. It was only necessary to look for a moment at the fair,
open forehead, the still, tranquil eye of gentle, habitual authority, the
sweet gravity that lay upon the lips, to hear the clear answers to the
pupils' questions, to notice how every request had the force without the
form of a command, and the young man could not doubt that the good genius
of the school stood before him in the person of Helen barley.

It was the old story. A poor country-clergyman dies, and leaves a widow
and a daughter. In Old England the daughter would have eaten the bitter
bread of a governess in some rich family. In New England she must keep a
school. So, rising from one sphere to another, she at length finds
herself the prima donna in the department of instruction in Mr. Silas
Peckham's educational establishment.

What a miserable thing it is to be poor. She was dependent, frail,
sensitive, conscientious. She was in the power of a hard, grasping,
thin-blooded, tough-fibred, trading educator, who neither knew nor cared
for a tender woman's sensibilities, but who paid her and meant to have
his money's worth out of her brains, and as much more than his money's
worth as he could get. She was consequently, in plain English,
overworked, and an overworked woman is always a sad sight,--sadder a
great deal than an overworked man, because she is so much more fertile in
capacities of suffering than a man. She has so many varieties of
headache,--sometimes as if Jael were driving the nail that killed Sisera
into her temples,--sometimes letting her work with half her brain while
the other half throbs as if it would go to pieces,--sometimes tightening
round the brows as if her cap-band were a ring of iron,--and then her
neuralgias, and her backaches, and her fits of depression, in which she
thinks she is nothing and less than nothing, and those paroxysms which
men speak slightingly of as hysterical,--convulsions, that is all, only
not commonly fatal ones,--so many trials which belong to her fine and
mobile structure,--that she is always entitled to pity, when she is
placed in conditions which develop her nervous tendencies.

The poor young lady's work had, of course, been doubled since the
departure of Master Langdon's predecessor. Nobody knows what the
weariness of instruction is, as soon as the teacher's faculties begin to
be overtasked, but thos