n we finish
building an air castle we seldom live in it after all; we sometimes even
forget that we ever longed to! Perhaps we have gone so far as to
begin another castle on a higher hilltop, and this is so
beautiful,--especially while we are building, and before we live in
it!--that the first one has quite vanished from sight and mind, like the
outgrown shell of the nautilus that he casts off on the shore and never
looks at again. (At least I suppose he doesn't; but perhaps he takes one
backward glance, half-smiling, half-serious, just as I am doing at my
old Thought Book, and says, "WAS THAT MY SHELL! GOODNESS GRACIOUS! HOW
DID I EVER SQUEEZE MYSELF INTO IT!")

That bit about the nautilus sounds like an extract from a school theme,
or a "Pilot" editorial, or a fragment of one of dear Miss Maxwell's
lectures, but I think girls of sixteen are principally imitations of the
people and things they love and admire; and between editing the "Pilot,"
writing out Virgil translations, searching for composition subjects, and
studying rhetorical models, there is very little of the original
Rebecca Rowena about me at the present moment; I am just a member of
the graduating class in good and regular standing. We do our hair alike,
dress alike as much as possible, eat and drink alike, talk alike,--I am
not even sure that we do not think alike; and what will become of the
poor world when we are all let loose upon it on the same day of June?
Will life, real life, bring our true selves back to us? Will love and
duty and sorrow and trouble and work finally wear off the "school stamp"
that has been pressed upon all of us until we look like rows of shining
copper cents fresh from the mint?

Yet there must be a little difference between us somewhere, or why does
Abijah Flagg write Latin letters to Emma Jane, instead of to me? There
is one example on the other side of the argument,--Abijah Flagg. He
stands out from all the rest of the boys like the Rock of Gibraltar in
the geography pictures. Is it because he never went to school until he
was sixteen? He almost died of longing to go, and the longing seemed to
teach him more than going. He knew his letters, and could read simple
things, but it was I who taught him what books really meant when I was
eleven and he thirteen. We studied while he was husking corn or cutting
potatoes for seed, or shelling beans in the Squire's barn. His beloved
Emma Jane didn't teach him; her father wold not have