rom the soreness of a soul which is sympathizing with a
morbid state of the body that it is no wonder they are often confounded.
And thus many good women are suffered to perish by that form of
spontaneous combustion in which the victim goes on toiling day and night
with the hidden fire consuming her, until all at once her cheek whitens,
and, as we look upon her, she drops away, a heap of ashes. The more they
overwork themselves, the more exacting becomes the sense of duty,--as the
draught of the locomotive's furnace blows stronger and makes the fire
burn more fiercely, the faster it spins along the track.

It is not very likely, as was said at the beginning of this chapter, that
we shall trouble ourselves a great deal about the internal affairs of the
Apollinean Institute. These schools are, in the nature of things, not so
very unlike each other as to require a minute description for each
particular one among them. They have all very much the same general
features, pleasing and displeasing. All feeding-establishments have
something odious about them,--from the wretched country-houses where
paupers are farmed out to the lowest bidder, up to the commons-tables at
colleges and even the fashionable boarding-house. A person's appetite
should be at war with no other purse than his own. Young people,
especially, who have a bone-factory at work in them, and have to feed the
living looms of innumerable growing tissues, should be provided for, if
possible, by those who love them like their own flesh and blood.
Elsewhere their appetites will be sure to make them enemies, or, what are
almost as bad, friends whose interests are at variance with the claims of
their exacting necessities and demands.

Besides, all commercial transactions in regard to the most sacred
interests of life are hateful even to those who profit by them. The
clergyman, the physician, the teacher, must be paid; but each of them, if
his duty be performed in the true spirit, can hardly help a shiver of
disgust when money is counted out to him for administering the
consolations of religion, for saving some precious life, for sowing the
seeds of Christian civilization in young ingenuous souls.

And yet all these schools, with their provincial French and their
mechanical accomplishments, with their cheap parade of diplomas and
commencements and other public honors, have an ever fresh interest to all
who see the task they are performing in our new social order