le corps of instructors to rough
out and finish the hundred young lady scholars it sheltered beneath its
roof. First, Mr. and Mrs. Peckham, the Principal and the Matron of the
school. Silas Peckham was a thorough Yankee, born on a windy part of
the coast, and reared chiefly on salt-fish. Everybody knows the type of
Yankee produced by this climate and diet: thin, as if he had been split
and dried; with an ashen kind of complexion, like the tint of the food
he is made of; and about as sharp, tough, juiceless, and biting to deal
with as the other is to the taste. Silas Peckham kept a young ladies'
school exactly as he would have kept a hundred head of cattle,--for the
simple, unadorned purpose of making just as much money in just as few
years as could be safely done. Mr. Peckham gave very little personal
attention to the department of instruction, but was always busy with
contracts for flour and potatoes, beef and pork, and other nutritive
staples, the amount of which required for such an establishment was
enough to frighten a quartermaster. Mrs. Peckham was from the West,
raised on Indian corn and pork, which give a fuller outline and a more
humid temperament, but may perhaps be thought to render people a little
coarse-fibred. Her specialty was to look after the feathering, cackling,
roosting, rising, and general behavior of these hundred chicks. An
honest, ignorant woman, she could not have passed an examination in the
youngest class. So this distinguished institution was under the charge
of a commissary and a housekeeper, and its real business was making
money by taking young girls in as boarders.

Connected with this, however, was the incidental fact, which the public
took for the principal one, namely, the business of instruction.
Mr. Peckham knew well enough that it was just as well to have good
instructors as bad ones, so far as cost was concerned, and a great deal
better for the reputation of his feeding-establishment. He tried to
get the best he could without paying too much, and, having got them, to
screw all the work out of them that could possibly be extracted.

There was a master for the English branches, with a young lady
assistant. There was another young lady who taught French, of the
ahvaung and baundahng style, which does not exactly smack of the
asphalt of the Boulevards. There was also a German teacher of music, who
sometimes helped in French of the ahfaung and bauntaung style,--so that,
between the tw