th, _nowhere a moment of
unreconnoitred solitude_.

At home Ivo had been the pet of the family: when he sat at his books,
his mother made it her especial care to see that no noise was made near
him; scarcely was any one permitted to enter the room, and an
impression was made as if a saint was engaged in working miracles
there. Here, on the contrary, when the studies were resumed after
supper, whispers would be heard here and there, which distracted his
attention and took away the edge of his industry. Those who know the
inscrutable power that often animates the soul which mirrors itself in
its own thoughts or drinks in the thoughts of others, who are
acquainted with that mute intellectual commerce which extends its
organs and spreads its fragrance like a budding flower, will appreciate
the regret of Ivo at never being left to himself. He was no longer his
own property: a society moved him as if he had been one of their
fingers or teeth.

At nine o'clock there were prayers once more, after which every one was
compelled to go to bed. Here, at last, Ivo returned to himself, and his
thoughts travelled homeward, until sleep spread its mantle over him.

Thus it happened that for some days Ivo felt as if he had been sold
into slavery. Nowhere was there a trace of free will; every word and
every thought was hedged in by injunctions and commandments; the
_inflexibility of the law_ raised a cold high wall before him wherever
he turned. It is a consistent deduction from the essence of every
Church which has reached the development of a fixed and unchanging form
of ritual and tenet, to begin in early youth with the task of tapping
the fountain-head of individual self-regulation in the hearts and minds
of its pupils, and of clapping them into the iron harness of its
unbending forms. But the highest effort of education should be to draw
out this self-regulating principle, and not to repress it; to educe the
laws of right and wrong from the workings of the young mind, and not to
nail a foreign growth upon the stock after having deadened the source
from which alone a healthy fruitage could spring.

Ivo was so low-spirited that a single harsh word sufficed to bring
tears to his eyes. Some of the naughtiest of his companions discovered
this, and teased him in all sorts of ways. Many of these boys were of
the coarsest stamp,--had left the most humble abodes behind them, and
found every thing their hearts desired in the good food and t