There are also opportunities for exercise several times in the day, at short intervals, which cannot easily be explained.  From a quarter past four to five o’clock, study; then dinner, and soon after, tea.  From seven to nine, two hours of study; immediately after which all retire for the night, and lights in the sleeping apartments must be extinguished at half past nine.’” You have summed up the total already, Dolorosus; I see it on your lips;—­nine—­hours—­ and—­a quarter of study, and one solitary hour for exercise, not counting those inexplicable “short intervals which cannot easily be explained!”

You will be pleased to hear that I have had an opportunity of witnessing the brilliant results of Mrs. Destructive’s system, in the case of my charming little neighbor, Fanny Carroll.  She has lately returned from a stay of one year under that fashionable roof.  In most respects, I was assured, the results of the school were all that could be desired; the mother informed me, with delight, that the child now spoke French like an angel from Paris, and handled her silver fork like a seraph from the skies.  You may well suppose that I hastened to call upon her; for the gay little creature was always a great pet of mine, and I always quoted her with delight, as a proof that bloom and strength were not monopolized by English girls.  In the parlor I found the mother closeted with the family physician.  Soon, Fanny, aged sixteen, glided in,—­a pale spectre, exquisite in costume, unexceptionable in manners, looking in all respects like an exceedingly used-up belle of five-and-twenty.  “What were you just saying that some of my Fanny’s symptoms were, Doctor?” asked the languid mother, as if longing for a second taste of some dainty morsel.  The courteous physician dropped them into her eager palm, like sugar-plums, one by one:  “Vertigo, headache, neuralgic pains, and general debility.”  The mother sighed once genteelly at me, and then again, quite sincerely, to herself;—­but I never yet saw an habitual invalid who did not seem to take a secret satisfaction in finding her child to be a chip of the old block, though block and chip were both wofully decayed.  However, nothing is now said of Miss Carroll’s returning to school; and the other day I actually saw her dashing through the lane on the family pony, with a tinge of the old brightness in her cheeks.  I ventured to inquire of her, soon after, if she had finished her education; and she replied, with a slight tinge of satire, that she studied regularly every day, at various “short intervals, which could not easily be explained.”

Five hours a day the safe limit for study, Dolorosus, and these terrible schools quietly put into their programmes nine, ten, eleven hours; and the deluded parents think they have out-manoeuvred the laws of Nature, and made a better bargain with Time.  But these are private, exclusive schools, you may say, for especially favored children.  We cannot afford to have most of the rising generation murdered