should be willing to hold your
train for the sake of seeing you in your court feathers and things.

As for myself, I have been thinking of late that I would become either a
professional lecturer or head mistress of a great school or college for
girls. I have tried the first business a little. Last month I delivered
a lecture on Quaternions. I got three for my audience; two came over
from the Institute, and one from that men's college which they try to
make out to be a university, and where no female is admitted unless she
belongs among the quadrupeds. I enjoyed lecturing, but the subject is a
difficult one, and I don't think any one of them had any very clear
notion of what I was talking about, except Rhodora,--and I know she did
n't. To tell the truth, I was lecturing to instruct myself. I mean to
try something easier next time. I have thought of the Basque language
and literature. What do you say to that?

The Society goes on famously. We have had a paper presented and read
lately which has greatly amused some of us and provoked a few of the
weaker sort. The writer is that crabbed old Professor of Belles-Lettres
at that men's college over there. He is dreadfully hard on the poor
"poets," as they call themselves. It seems that a great many young
persons, and more especially a great many young girls, of whom the
Institute has furnished a considerable proportion, have taken to sending
him their rhymed productions to be criticised,--expecting to be praised,
no doubt, every one of them. I must give you one of the sauciest
extracts from his paper in his own words:

"It takes half my time to read the 'poems' sent me by young people of
both sexes. They would be more shy of doing it if they knew that I
recognize a tendency to rhyming as a common form of mental weakness, and
the publication of a thin volume of verse as prima facie evidence of
ambitious mediocrity, if not inferiority. Of course there are exceptions
to this rule of judgment, but I maintain that the presumption is always
against the rhymester as compared with the less pretentious persons about
him or her, busy with some useful calling,--too busy to be tagging
rhymed commonplaces together. Just now there seems to be an epidemic of
rhyming as bad as the dancing mania, or the sweating sickness. After
reading a certain amount of manuscript verse one is disposed to
anathematize the inventor of homophonous syllabification. [This phrase
made a great laugh when it was r