grew to look like ram's-horns.

Rockland would have been but half a town without its pond; Quinnepeg
Pond was the name of it, but the young ladies of the Apollinean
Institute were very anxious that it should be called Crystalline Lake.
It was here that the young folks used to sail in summer and skate in
winter; here, too, those queer, old, rum-scented, good-for-nothing,
lazy, story-telling, half-vagabonds, that sawed a little wood or dug a
few potatoes now and then under the pretence of working for their
living, used to go and fish through the ice for pickerel every winter.
And here those three young people were drowned, a few summers ago, by
the upsetting of a sail-boat in a sudden flaw of wind. There is not one
of these smiling ponds that has not devoured more youths and maidens
than any of those monsters the ancients used to tell such lies about.
But it was a pretty pond, and never looked more innocent--so the native
"bard" of Rockland said in his elegy--than on the morning when they
found Sarah Jane and Ellen Maria floating among the lily-pads.

The Apollinean Institute, or Institoot, as it was more commonly called,
was, in the language of its Prospectus, a "first-class Educational
Establishment." It employed a considerable 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. Of course the great problem was, to feed
these hundred hungry misses at the cheapest practicable rate, precisely
as it would be with the cattle. So that 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. Peckh