she worked out a set
hysteric spasm as she best might, without anybody to rub her hands and
see that she did not hurt herself.

By and by she got quiet, rose and went to her bookcase, took down a
volume of Coleridge, and read a short time, and so to bed, to sleep and
wake from time to time with a sudden start out of uneasy dreams.

Perhaps it is of no great consequence what it was in the composition
which set her off into this nervous paroxysm. She was in such a state
that almost any slight agitation would have brought on the attack, and it
was the accident of her transient excitability, very probably, which made
a trifling cause the seeming occasion of so much disturbance. The theme
was signed, in the same peculiar, sharp, slender hand, E. Venner, and
was, of course, written by that wild-looking girl who had excited the
master's curiosity and prompted his question, as before mentioned. The
next morning the lady-teacher looked pale and wearied, naturally enough,
but she was in her place at the usual hour, and Master Langdon in his
own.

The girls had not yet entered the school room.

"You have been ill, I am afraid," said Mr. Bernard.

"I was not well yesterday," she, answered. "I had a worry and a kind of
fright. It is so dreadful to have the charge of all these young souls
and bodies. Every young girl ought to walk locked close, arm in arm,
between two guardian angels. Sometimes I faint almost with the thought
of all that I ought to do, and of my own weakness and wants.--Tell me,
are there not natures born so out of parallel with the lines of natural
law that nothing short of a miracle can bring them right?"

Mr. Bernard had speculated somewhat, as all thoughtful persons of his
profession are forced to do, on the innate organic tendencies with which
individuals, families, and races are born. He replied, therefore, with a
smile, as one to whom the question suggested a very familiar class of
facts.

"Why, of course. Each of us is only the footing-up of a double column of
figures that goes back to the first pair. Every unit tells,--and some of
them are plus, and some minus. If the columns don't add up right, it is
commonly because we can't make out all the figures. I don't mean to say
that something may not be added by Nature to make up for losses and keep
the race to its average, but we are mainly nothing but the answer to a
long sum in addition and subtraction. No doubt there are people born
with