And the Sunday Schools cooeperate with the week-day seminaries in the pious work of destruction.  Dolorosus, are all your small neighbors hard at work in committing to memory Scripture texts for a wager,—­I have an impression, however, that they call it a prize,—­consisting of one Bible?  In my circle of society the excitement runs high.  At any tea-drinking, you may hear the ladies discussing the comparative points and prospects of their various little Ellens and Harriets, with shrill eagerness; while their husbands, on the other side of the room, are debating the merits of Ethan Allen and Flora Temple, the famous trotting-horses, who are soon expected to try their speed on our “Agricultural Ground.”  Each horse, and each girl, appears to have enthusiastic backers, though the Sunday-School excitement has the advantage of lasting longer.  From inquiry, I find the state of the field to be about as follows:—­Fanny Hastings, who won the prize last year, is not to be entered for it again; she damaged her memory by the process, her teacher tells me, so that she can now scarcely fix the simplest lesson in her mind.  Carry Blake had got up to five thousand verses, but had such terrible headaches that her mother compelled her to stop, some weeks ago; the texts have all vanished from her brain, but the headache unfortunately still lingers.  Nelly Sanborn has reached six thousand, although her anxious father long since tried to buy her off by offering her a new Bible twice as handsome as the prize one:  but what did she care for that? she said; she had handsome Bibles already, but she had no intention of being beaten by Ella Prentiss.  Poor child, we see no chance for her; for Ella has it all her own way; she has made up a score of seven thousand one hundred texts, and it is only three days to the fatal Sunday.  Between ourselves, I think Nelly does her work more fairly; for Ella has a marvellous ingenuity in picking out easy verses, like Jack Horner’s plums, and valuing every sacred sentence, not by its subject, but by its shortness.  Still, she is bound to win.

“How is her health this summer?” I asked her mother, the other day.

“Well, her verses weigh on her,” said the good woman, solemnly.

And here I pledge you my word, Dolorosus, that to every one of these statements I might append, as Miss Edgeworth does to every particularly tough story,—­“N.B.  This is a fact.” I will only add that our Sunday-School Superintendent, who is a physician, told me that he had as strong objections to the whole thing as I could have; but that it was no use talking; all the other schools did it, and ours must; emulation was the order of the day.  “Besides,” he added, with that sort of cheerful hopelessness peculiar to his profession, “the boys are not trying for the prize much, this year; and as for the girls, they would probably lose their health very soon, at any rate, and may as well devote it to a sacred cause.”