, on my low seat, when I was
successful, and very pleasant were her "good words" to my ear. Bless your
heart! I remember at this moment the feeling of her soft brown curls upon
my cheek; and I would give almost anything now to see the first
"certificate" of good conduct which I brought home, in her handwriting, to
my mother, and which was kept for years among fans, bits of dried
orange-peel, and sprigs of withered "caraway," in a corner of the
bureau-"draw." All this came very vividly to me some time ago, when my own
little boy brought home _his_ first "school-ticket." He is not called,
however--and I rejoice that he is not--to remember dear companions, who
"bewept to the grave did go, with true-love showers."

"Oh, my mother! oh, my childhood!
Oh, my brother, now no more!
Oh, the years that push me onward,
Farther from that distant shore!"

But I am led away. I wanted merely to say that this "school-ma'am," from
the simple _love_ of her children, her little scholars, knew how to teach
and how to _rule_ them. I hope that not a few "school-ma'ams" will peruse
this hastily-prepared gossip; and if they do, I trust they will remember,
in the treatment of their little charges, that "the heart _must_ leap
kindly back to kindness." Why, my dear sir, I used to wait, in the summer
afternoons, until all the little pupils had gone on before, so that I could
place in the soft white hand of my school-mistress as confiding a little
hand as any in which she may afterwards have placed her own, "in the full
trust of love." I hope she found a husband good and true, and that she was
blessed with what she loved, "wisely" and _not_ "too well," children.

Now that I am on the subject of children at school, I wish to pursue the
theme at a little greater length, and give you an incident or two in my
farther experience.

It was not long after finishing our summer course with "school-ma'am" Mary
----, that we were transferred to a "man-school," kept in the district. And
here I must go back, for just one moment, to say that, among the
pleasantest things that I remember of that period, was the calling upon us
in the morning, by the neighbors' children--and especially two little
girls, new-comers from the "Black River country," then a vague terra
incognita to us, yet only some thirty miles away--to accompany us to the
school through the winter snow. How well I remember their knitted
red-and-white woolen hoods, and the red-and-white