l boys though we were, that our instructors kept being
instructresses and thereby a grave reflection both on our attainments
and our spirit. A bevy of these educative ladies passes before me, I
still possess their names; as for instance that of Mrs. Daly and that of
Miss Rogers (previously of the "Chelsea Female Institute," though at the
moment of Sixth Avenue this latter), whose benches indeed my brother
didn't haunt, but who handled us literally with gloves--I still see the
elegant objects as Miss Rogers beat time with a long black ferule to
some species of droning chant or chorus in which we spent most of our
hours; just as I see her very tall and straight and spare, in a light
blue dress, her firm face framed in long black glossy ringlets and the
stamp of the Chelsea Female Institute all over her. Mrs. Daly, clearly
the immediate successor to the nebulous Miss Bayou, remains quite
substantial--perhaps because the sphere of her small influence has
succeeded in not passing away, up to this present writing; so that in
certain notes on New York published a few years since I was moved to
refer to it with emotion as one of the small red houses on the south
side of Waverley Place that really carry the imagination back to a
vanished social order. They carry mine to a stout red-faced lady with
grey hair and a large apron, the latter convenience somehow suggesting,
as she stood about with a resolute air, that she viewed her little
pupils as so many small slices cut from the loaf of life and on which
she was to dab the butter of arithmetic and spelling, accompanied by way
of jam with a light application of the practice of prize-giving. I
recall an occasion indeed, I must in justice mention, when the jam
really was thick--my only memory of a schoolfeast, strange to say,
throughout our young annals: something uncanny in the air of the
schoolroom at the unwonted evening or late afternoon hour, and tables
that seemed to me prodigiously long and on which the edibles were chunky
and sticky. The stout red-faced lady must have been Irish, as the name
she bore imported--or do I think so but from the indescribably Irish
look of her revisited house? It refers itself at any rate to a New York
age in which a little more or a little less of the colour was scarce
notable in the general flush.

Of pure unimported strain, however, were Miss Sedgwick and Mrs. Wright
(Lavinia D.), the next figures in the procession--the procession that
was to wi