ce to recover her natural elasticity and buoyancy. Many
of the noblest women, suffering like her, but less fortunate in being
relieved at the right moment, die worried out of life by the perpetual
teasing of this inflamed, neuralgic conscience. So subtile is the line
which separates the true and almost angelic sensibility of a healthy,
but exalted nature, from the soreness of a soul which is sympathizing
with a morbid state of the body that it is no wonder they are often
confounded. And thus many good women are suffered to perish by that form
of spontaneous combustion in which the victim goes on toiling day and
night with the hidden fire consuming her, until all at once her cheek
whitens, and, as we look upon her, she drops away, a heap of ashes. The
more they overwork themselves, the more exacting becomes the sense of
duty,--as the draught of the locomotive's furnace blows stronger and
makes the fire burn more fiercely, the faster it spins along the track.

It is not very likely, as was said at the beginning of this chapter,
that we shall trouble ourselves a great deal about the internal affairs
of the Apollinean Institute. These schools are, in the nature of things,
not so very unlike each other as to require a minute description for
each particular one among them. They have all very much the same general
features, pleasing and displeasing. All feeding-establishments have
something odious about them,--from the wretched country-houses where
paupers are farmed out to the lowest bidder, up to the commons-tables
at colleges and even the fashionable boarding-house. A person's appetite
should be at war with no other purse than his own. Young people,
especially, who have a bone-factory at work in them, and have to feed
the living looms of innumerable growing tissues, should be provided
for, if possible, by those who love them like their own flesh and blood.
Elsewhere their appetites will be sure to make them enemies, or, what
are almost as bad, friends whose interests are at variance with the
claims of their exacting necessities and demands.

Besides, all commercial transactions in regard to the most sacred
interests of life are hateful even to those who profit by them. The
clergyman, the physician, the teacher, must be paid; but each of them,
if his duty be performed in the true spirit, can hardly help a shiver
of disgust when money is counted out to him for administering the
consolations of religion, for saving some precio