n and parallelism of character,
that it seems as if Nature must turn out human beings in sets like
chessmen.

It must be confessed that the position in which Mr. Bernard now found
himself had a pleasing danger about it which might well justify all the
fears entertained on his account by more experienced friends, when they
learned that he was engaged in a Young Ladies' Seminary. The school
never went on more smoothly than during the first period of his
administration, after he had arranged its duties, and taken his share,
and even more than his share, upon himself. But human nature does not
wait for the diploma of the Apollinean Institute to claim the exercise
of it, instincts and faculties. These young girls saw but little of
the youth of the neighborhood. The mansion-house young men were off at
college or in the cities, or making love to each other's sisters, or
at any rate unavailable for some reason or other. There were a few
"clerks,"--that is, young men who attended shops, commonly called
"stores,"--who were fond of walking by the Institute, when they were off
duty, for the sake of exchanging a word or a glance with any one of
the young ladies they might happen to know, if any such were stirring
abroad: crude young men, mostly, with a great many "Sirs" and "Ma'ams"
in their speech, and with that style of address sometimes acquired in
the retail business, as if the salesman were recommending himself to
a customer, "First-rate family article, Ma'am; warranted to wear a
lifetime; just one yard and three quarters in this pattern, Ma'am;
sha'n't I have the pleasure?" and so forth. If there had been ever so
many of them, and if they had been ever so fascinating, the quarantine
of the Institute was too rigorous to allow any romantic infection to be
introduced from without.

Anybody might see what would happen, with a good-looking, well-dressed,
well-bred young man, who had the authority of a master, it is true, but
the manners of a friend and equal, moving about among these young girls
day after day, his eyes meeting theirs, his breath mingling with theirs,
his voice growing familiar to them, never in any harsh tones, often
soothing, encouraging, always sympathetic, with its male depth and
breadth of sound among the chorus of trebles, as if it were a river in
which a hundred of these little piping streamlets-might lose themselves;
anybody might see what would happen. Young girls wrote home to their
parents that they enj