DIFFICULTY AND UNCERTAINTY OF WRITING FOR A LIVING.

One study in our curriculum at the Andover School I have omitted
to mention in its place; but, of them all, it was the most
characteristic, and would be most interesting to an outsider. Where
else but in Andover would a group of a dozen and a half girls be put
to studying theology? Yet this is precisely what we did. Not that we
called our short hour with Professor Park on Tuesday evenings by that
long word; nor did he. It was understood that we had Bible lessons.

But the gist of the matter was, that we were taught Professor Park's
theology.

We had our note-books, like the students in the chapel lecture-rooms,
and we took docile notes of the great man's views on the attributes of
the Deity, on election and probation, on atonement and sanctification,
on eschatology, and the rest.

Girls' with pink ribbons at white throats, and girls with blue silk
nets on their pretty hair, fluttered in like bees and butterflies, and
settled about the long dining-room table, at whose end, with a shade
over his eyes to shield them from the light, the professor sat in a
dark corner.

Thence he promulgated stately doctrines to those soft and dreaming
woman-creatures, who did not care a maple-leaf whether we sinned
in Adam, or whether the Trinity were separate as persons or as
attributes; but who drew little portraits of their dearest Academy
boys on the margins of their lecture-books, and passed these to their
particular intimates in surreptitious interludes between doctrines.

What must have been the professor's private speculations on those
Tuesday evenings? I had a certain sense of their probable nature, even
then; and glanced furtively into the dark corner for glimpses of the
distant, sarcastic smile which I felt must be carving itself upon the
lines of his strong face. But I never caught him at it; not once. With
the gravity befitting his awful topics, and with the dignity belonging
to his Chair and to his fame, the professor taught the butterflies,
to the best of my knowledge and belief, as conscientiously as he did
those black-coated beetles yonder, the theologues on the Seminary
benches.

[Illustration: "THE OLD BRICK ACADEMY," PHILLIPS ACADEMY, ANDOVER,
MASSACHUSETTS, WITH THE CLASS OF 1861 IN FRONT.

Of the class of 1861 over twenty went into the war, and several died
in battle or in war prisons. Lieutenant S.H. Thompson, son of the late
Professor William Thompson o