Soon after my return from St. Louis, I received a call from Packer Institute in Brooklyn, to teach English Literature, which was most agreeable.  But when I arrived, the principal, Mr. Crittenden, told me that the woman who had done that work had decided to remain.  I was asked by Mr. Crittenden, “Can you read?” “Yes, I think so.”  “Then come with me.”  He touched a bell and then escorted me to the large chapel capable of holding nearly twelve hundred, where I found the entire faculty assembled to listen to my efforts.  I was requested to stand up in the pulpit and read from a large Bible the fourteenth chapter of John, and the twenty-third psalm.  That was easy enough.  Next request, “Please recite something comic.”  I gave them “Comic Miseries.”  “Now try a little pathos.”  I recited Alice Cary’s “The Volunteer,” which was one of my favourite poems.  Then I heard a professor say to Mr. Crittenden, “She recites with great taste and expression; what a pity she has that lisp!” And hitherto I had been blissfully unaware of such a failing.  One other selection in every-day prose, and I was let off.  The faculty were now exchanging their opinions and soon dispersed without one word to me.  I said to Mr. Crittenden, as I came down the pulpit stairs, “I do not want to take the place.”  But he insisted that they all wanted me to come and begin work at once.  I had large classes, number of pupils eight hundred and fifty.  It was a great opportunity to help young girls to read in such a way that it would be a pleasure to their home friends, or to recite in company, as was common then, naturally and without gestures.  I took one more class of little girls who had received no training before in that direction.  They were easy to inspire, were wholly free from self-consciousness, and their parents were so much pleased that we gave an exhibition of what they could do in reading and recitation in combination with their gymnastics.  The chapel was crowded to the doors.  A plump little German girl was the star of the evening.  She stood perfectly serene, her chubby arms stuck out stiffly from her sides, and in a loud, clear voice she recited this nonsense: 

If the butterfly courted the bee,
And the owl the porcupine;
If churches were built on the sea,
And three times one were nine;
If the pony rode his master,
And the buttercups ate the cows;
And the cat had the dire disaster
To be worried, sir, by a mouse;
And mamma, sir, sold her baby,
To a gypsy for half a crown,
And a gentleman were a lady,
This world would be upside down. 
But, if any or all these wonders
Should ever come about,
I should not think them blunders,
For I should be inside out.

An encore was insisted on.

I offered to give any in my classes lessons in “how to tell a story” with ease, brevity, and point, promising to give an anecdote of my own suggested by theirs every time.  This pleased them, and we had a jolly time.  The first girl who tried to tell a story said: