But I am led away.  I wanted merely to say that this “school-ma’am,” from the simple love of her children, her little scholars, knew how to teach and how to rule them.  I hope that not a few “school-ma’ams” will peruse this hastily-prepared gossip; and if they do, I trust they will remember, in the treatment of their little charges, that “the heart must leap kindly back to kindness.”  Why, my dear sir, I used to wait, in the summer afternoons, until all the little pupils had gone on before, so that I could place in the soft white hand of my school-mistress as confiding a little hand as any in which she may afterwards have placed her own, “in the full trust of love.”  I hope she found a husband good and true, and that she was blessed with what she loved, “wisely” and not “too well,” children.

Now that I am on the subject of children at school, I wish to pursue the theme at a little greater length, and give you an incident or two in my farther experience.

It was not long after finishing our summer course with “school-ma’am” Mary ——­, that we were transferred to a “man-school,” kept in the district.  And here I must go back, for just one moment, to say that, among the pleasantest things that I remember of that period, was the calling upon us in the morning, by the neighbors’ children—­and especially two little girls, new-comers from the “Black River country,” then a vague terra incognita to us, yet only some thirty miles away—­to accompany us to the school through the winter snow.  How well I remember their knitted red-and-white woolen hoods, and the red-and-white complexions beaming with youth and high health beneath them!  I think of Motherwell’s going to school with his “dear Jenny Morrison,” so touchingly described in his beautiful poem of that name, every time these scenes arise before me.

Well, at this “man-school” I first learned the lesson which I am about to illustrate.  It is a lesson for parents, a lesson for instructors, and, I think, a lesson for children also.  I remember names here, for one was almost burned into my brain for years afterwards.

There was something very imposing about “opening the school” on the first day of the winter session.  The trustees of the same were present; a hard-headed old farmer, who sent long piles of “cord wood,” beach, maple, bass-wood, and birch, out of his “own pocket,” he used to say—­and he might, with equal propriety, have said, “out of his own head,” for surely there was no lack of “timber;” Deacon C——­, an educated Puritan, who could spell, read, write, “punctify,” and—­“knew grammar,” as he himself expressed it; a thin-faced doctor, whose horse was snorting at the door, and who sat, on that occasion, with his saddle-bags crossed on his knee, being in something of a hurry, expecting, I believe, an “addition” in the neighborhood, to the subject of my present gossip—­at all events, I well remember peeping under the wrinkled