Aunt Mercy had not introduced me to Miss Black as the daughter of Locke Morgeson, the richest man in Surrey, but simply as her niece.  Her pride prevented her from making any exhibition of my antecedents, which was wise, considering that I had none.  My grandfather, John Morgeson, was a nobody,—­merely a “Co.”; and though my great-grandfather, Locke Morgeson, was worthy to be called a Somebody, it was not his destiny to make a stir in the world.  Many of the families of my Barmouth schoolmates had the fulcrum of a moneyed grandfather.  The knowledge of the girls did not extend to that period in the family history when its patriarchs started in the pursuit of Gain.  Elmira Sawyer, one of Miss Black’s pupils, never heard that her grandfather “Black Peter,” as he was called, had made excursions, in an earlier part of his life, on the River Congo, or that he was familiar with the soundings of Loango Bay.  As he returned from his voyages, bringing more and more money, he enlarged his estate, and grew more and more respectable, retiring at last from the sea, to become a worthy landsman; he paid taxes to church and state, and even had a silver communion cup, among the pewter service used on the occasion of the Lord’s Supper; but he never was brought to the approval of that project of the Congregational Churches,—­the colonization of the Blacks to Liberia.  Neither was Hersila Allen aware that the pink calico in which I first saw her was remotely owing to West India Rum.  Nor did Charlotte Alden, the proudest girl in school, know that her grandfather’s, Squire Alden’s, stepping-stone to fortune was the loss of the brig Capricorn, which was wrecked in the vicinity of a comfortable port, on her passage out to the whaling-ground.  An auger had been added to the meager outfit, and long after the sea had leaked through the hole bored through her bottom, and swallowed her, and the insurance had been paid, the truth leaked out that the captain had received instructions, which had been fulfilled.  Whereupon two Insurance Companies went to law with him, and a suit ensued, which ended in their paying costs, in addition to what they had before paid Squire Alden, who winked in a derisive manner at the Board of Directors when he received its check.

There were others who belonged in the category of Decayed Families, as exclusive as they were shabby.  There were parvenus, which included myself.  When I entered the school it was divided into clans, each with its spites, jealousies, and emulations.  Its esprit de corps, however, was developed by my arrival; the girls united against me, and though I perceived, when I compared myself with them, that they were partly right in their opinions, their ridicule stupefied and crushed me.  They were trained, intelligent, and adroit; I uncouth, ignorant, and without tact.  It was impossible for Miss Black not to be affected by the general feeling in regard to me.  Her pupils knew sooner than I that she sympathized with them.  She embarrassed me, when I should have despised her.  At first her regimen surprised, then filled me with a dumb, clouded anger, which made me appear apathetic.