nd exactness for amplification.
This girl, who if she had been fed on poetry and works of imagination,
might have become a Miss Sparkes, now rather gives herself the airs of a
calculator and of a grave computist. Though as in the case of the cat in
the fable, who was metamorphosed into a lady, nature will breath out as
soon as the scratching of a mouse is heard; and all Ph[oe]be's
philosophy can scarcely keep her in order, if any work of fancy comes in
her way.

"To soften the horrors of her fate, however, I allowed her to read a few
of the best things in her favorite class. When I read to her the more
delicate parts of Gulliver's Travels, with which she was enchanted, she
affected to be angry at the voyage to Laputa, because it ridicules
philosophical science. And in Brobdignag, she said, the proportions were
not correct. I must, however, explain to you, that the use which I made
of these dry studies with Ph[oe]be, was precisely the same which the
ingenious Mr. Cheshire makes of his steel machines for defective shapes,
to straiten a crooked tendency or strengthen a weak one. Having employed
these means to set her mind upright, and to cure a wrong bias; as that
skillful gentleman discards his apparatus as soon as the patient becomes
strait, so have I discontinued these pursuits, for I never meant to
make a mathematical lady. Jane has a fine ear and a pretty voice, and
will sing and play well enough for any girl who is not to make music her
profession. One or two of the others sing agreeably.

"The little one, who brought the last nosegay, has a strong turn for
natural history, and we all of us generally botanize a little of an
evening, which gives a fresh interest to our walks. She will soon draw
plants and flowers pretty accurately. Louisa also has some taste in
designing, and takes tolerable sketches from nature. These we encourage
because they are solitary pleasures, and want no witnesses. They all are
too eager to impart somewhat of what they know to your little favorite
Celia, who is in danger of picking up a little of every thing, the sure
way to excel in nothing.

"Thus each girl is furnished with some one source of independent
amusement. But what would become of them, or rather what would become of
their mother and me, if every one of them was a scholar, a
mathematician, a singer, a performer, a botanist, a painter? Did we
attempt to force all these acquirements and a dozen more on every girl;
all her _time_