I had taken to my class on the preceding week some specimens of ferns neatly gummed on white paper. . . .  This time I took a piece of coal- shale, with impressions of ferns, to show them. . . .  I told each to examine the specimen, and tell me what he thought it was.  W. gave so bright a smile that I saw he knew; none of the others could tell; he said they were ferns, like what I showed them last week, but he thought they were chiselled on the stone.  Their surprise and pleasure were great when I explained the matter to them.

The history of Joseph:  they all found a difficulty in realising that this had actually occurred.  One asked if Egypt existed now, and if people lived in it.  When I told them that buildings now stood which had been erected about the time of Joseph, one said that it was impossible, as they must have fallen down ere this.  I showed them the form of a pyramid, and they were satisfied.  One asked if all books were true.

   The story of Macbeth impressed them very much.  They knew the name of
   Shakespeare, having seen his name over a public-house.

A boy defined conscience as ’a thing a gentleman hasn’t got, who, when a boy finds his purse and gives it back to him, doesn’t give the boy sixpence.’

Another boy was asked, after a Sunday evening lecture on ‘Thankfulness,’ what pleasure he enjoyed most in the course of a year.  He replied candidly, ‘Cock-fightin’, ma’am; there’s a pit up by the “Black Boy” as is worth anythink in Brissel.’

There is something a little pathetic in the attempt to civilise the rough street-boy by means of the refining influence of ferns and fossils, and it is difficult to help feeling that Miss Carpenter rather overestimated the value of elementary education.  The poor are not to be fed upon facts.  Even Shakespeare and the Pyramids are not sufficient; nor is there much use in giving them the results of culture, unless we also give them those conditions under which culture can be realised.  In these cold, crowded cities of the North, the proper basis for morals, using the word in its wide Hellenic signification, is to be found in architecture, not in books.

Still, it would be ungenerous not to recognise that Mary Carpenter gave to the children of the poor not merely her learning, but her love.  In early life, her biographer tells us, she had longed for the happiness of being a wife and a mother; but later she became content that her affection could be freely given to all who needed it, and the verse in the prophecies, ‘I have given thee children whom thou hast not borne,’ seemed to her to indicate what was to be her true mission.  Indeed, she rather inclined to Bacon’s opinion, that unmarried people do the best public work.  ‘It is quite striking,’ she says in one of her letters, ’to observe how much the useful power and influence of woman has developed of late years.  Unattached ladies, such as widows and unmarried women, have quite ample work to do in the world for the good of others to absorb all their powers.  Wives and mothers have a very noble work given them by God, and want no more.’  The whole passage is extremely interesting, and the phrase ‘unattached ladies’ is quite delightful, and reminds one of Charles Lamb.