I had far rather study than teach."

"I believe everybody, except perhaps mothers, would agree with you,"
said Miss Young, who was now, without apology, plying her needle.

"Indeed! then I am very sorry for you."

"Thank you; but there's no need to be sorry for me. Do you suppose that
one's comfort lies in having a choice of employments? My experience
leads me to think the contrary."

"I do not think I could be happy," said Hester, "to be tied down to an
employment I did not like."

"Not to a positively disgusting one. But I am disposed to think that
the greatest number of happy people may be found busy in employments
that they have not chosen for themselves, and never would have chosen."

"I am afraid these very happy people are haunted by longings to be doing
something else."

"Yes: there is their great trouble. They think, till experience makes
them wiser, that if they were only in another set of circumstances, if
they only had a choice what they would do, a chance for the exercise of
the powers they are conscious of, they would do such things as should be
the wonder and the terror of the earth. But their powers may be
doubted, if they do not appear in the conquest of circumstances."

"So you conquer these giddy children, when you had rather be conquering
German metaphysicians, or ---, or ---, what else?"

"There is little to conquer in these children," said Miss Young; "they
are very good with me. I assure you I have much more to conquer in
myself, with regard to them. It is but little that I can do for them;
and that little I am apt to despise, in the vain desire to do more."

"How more?"

"If I had them in a house by myself, to spend their whole time with me,
so that I could educate, instead of merely teaching them. But here I am
doing just what we were talking of just now,--laying out a
pretty-looking field of duty, in which there would probably be as many
thorns as in any other. Teaching has its pleasures,--its great
occasional, and small daily pleasures, though they are not to be
compared to the sublime delights of education."

"You must have some of these sublime delights mixed in with the humbler.
You are, in some degree, educating these children while teaching them."

"Yes: but it is more a negative than a positive function, a very humble
one. Governesses to children at home can do little more than stand
between children and the faults of the people about them. I speak quite
genera