tten in a singular, sharp-pointed, long, slender
hand, on a kind of wavy, ribbed paper. There was something strangely
suggestive about the look of it, but exactly of what, Miss barley either
could not or did not try to think. The subject of the paper was The
Mountain,--the composition being a sort of descriptive rhapsody. It
showed a startling familiarity with some of the savage scenery of the
region. One would have said that the writer must have threaded its
wildest solitudes by the light of the moon and stars as well as by
day. As the teacher read on, her color changed, and a kind of tremulous
agitation came over her. There were hints in this strange paper she did
not know what to make of. There was something in its descriptions and
imagery that recalled,--Miss Darley could not say what,--but it made her
frightfully nervous. Still she could not help reading, till she came
to one passage which so agitated her, that the tired and over-wearied
girl's self-control left her entirely. She sobbed once or twice, then
laughed convulsively; and flung herself on the bed, where she worked out
a set hysteric spasm as she best might, without anybody to rub her hands
and see that she did not hurt herself.

By and by she got quiet, rose and went to her bookcase, took down a
volume of Coleridge, and read a short time, and so to bed, to sleep and
wake from time to time with a sudden start out of uneasy dreams.

Perhaps it is of no great consequence what it was in the composition
which set her off into this nervous paroxysm. She was in such a state
that almost any slight agitation would have brought on the attack, and
it was the accident of her transient excitability, very probably, which
made a trifling cause the seeming occasion of so much disturbance. The
theme was signed, in the same peculiar, sharp, slender hand, E. Venner,
and was, of course, written by that wild-looking girl who had excited
the master's curiosity and prompted his question, as before mentioned.
The next morning the lady-teacher looked pale and wearied, naturally
enough, but she was in her place at the usual hour, and Master Langdon
in his own.

The girls had not yet entered the school room.

"You have been ill, I am afraid," said Mr. Bernard.

"I was not well yesterday," she, answered. "I had a worry and a kind of
fright. It is so dreadful to have the charge of all these young souls
and bodies. Every young girl ought to walk locked close, arm in arm,
between