Of the matter of education I also have what are called “views.”  I may be peculiar.  School-committee-men who spell Jerusalem with a G, drill-sergeants who believe in black-boards and visible numerators, statistical fellows who judge of the future fate of the republic by the average attendance at the “Primaries,” may not agree with me in my idea of bending the twig.  I do believe, that, if Dame Nature herself should apply for a school, some of these wise Dogberries would report her “unqualyfide.”  I will not murder my pretty pet.  So she be gentle, kindly, and loving, what care I if at sixteen years of age she cannot paint the baptism of John upon velvet, does not know a word of that accursed French language, breaks down in the “forward and back” of a cotillon, and cannot with spider fingers spin upon the piano the swiftest Tarantelle of Chopin.—­[Illustration:  musical note] = 2558 Metronome?  We will find something better and braver than all that, my little Alice!  Confound your Italianos!—­the birds shall be the music-masters of my tiny dame.  Moonrise, and sunset, and the autumnal woods shall teach her tint and tone.  The flowers are older than the school-botanies;—­ she shall give them pet names at her own sweet will.  We will not go to big folios to find out the big Latin names of the butterflies; but be sure, pet, they and you shall be better acquainted.  And long before you have acquired that most profitless of all arts, the art of reading, we will go very deeply into ancient English literature.  There is the story of the enterprising mouse, who, at one o’clock precisely, ran down the clock to the cabalistic tune of “Dickory, dickory, dock.”  There are the bold bowl-mariners of Gotham.  There is “the man of our town,” who was unwise enough to destroy the organs of sight by jumping into a bramble-bush, and who came triumphantly out of the experiment, and “scratched them in again,” by boldly jumping into another bush,—­the oldest discoverer on record of the doctrine that similia similibus curantur.  There are Jack and Gill, who, not living in the days of the Cochituate, went up the hill for water, and who, in descending, met with cerebral injuries.  There are the dietetic difficulties of Mr. and Mrs. Sprat, with the happy solution of a problem at one time threatening the domestic peace of this amiable pair.  Be sure, little woman, we will find merry morsels in the silly-wise book!  And there will be other silly-wise books.  Cinderella shall again lose her slipper, and marry the prince; the wolf shall again eat little Red Ridinghood; and the small eyes grow big at the adventures of Sinbad, the gallant tar.  Will not this be better, Don Bob, than pistil and stamen and radicle? —­than wearing out BBB lead pencils in drawing tumble-down castles, rickety cottages, and dumpling-shaped trees?—­than acquiring a language which has no literature fit for a girl to read?—­than mistressing the absurd modern piano music?—­than taking diplomas from institutes, which most certainly do not express all that young women learn in those venerable seats of learning?  We will not put stays upon our pet until we are obliged to do so.  Birdie shall abide in the paternal nest, and sing the old home-songs, and walk in the old home-ways, until she has a nice new nest of her own.