boggy pools here and there at the edge of which the green frog, stupidest of his tribe, sat waiting to be victimized by boy or snapping-turtle long after the shy and agile leopard-frog had taken the six-foot spring that plumped him into the middle of the pool.  And on the neighboring banks the maiden-hair spread its flat disk of embroidered fronds on the wire-like stem that glistened polished and brown as the darkest tortoise-shell, and pale violets, cheated by the cold skies of their hues and perfume, sunned themselves like white-cheeked invalids.  Over these rose the old forest-trees,—­the maple, scarred with the wounds which had drained away its sweet life-blood,—­the beech, its smooth gray bark mottled so as to look like the body of one of those great snakes of old that used to frighten armies, always the mark of lovers’ knives, as in the days of Musidora and her swain,—­the yellow birch, rough as the breast of Silenus in old marbles,—­the wild cherry, its little bitter fruit lying unheeded at its foot,—­and, soaring over all, the huge, coarse-barked, splintery-limbed, dark-mantled hemlock, in the depth of whose aerial solitudes the crow brooded on her nest unscared, and the gray squirrel lived unharmed till his incisors grew to look like ram’s-horns.

Rockland would have been but half a town without its pond; Guinnepeg Pond was the name of it, but the young ladies of the Apollinean Institute were very anxious that it should be called Crystalline Lake.  It was here that the young folks used to sail in summer and skate in winter; here, too, those queer, old, rum-scented good-for-nothing, lazy, story-telling, half-vagabonds, who sawed a little wood or dug a few potatoes now and then under the pretence of working for their living, used to go and fish through the ice for pickerel every winter.  And here those three young people were drowned, a few summers ago, by the upsetting of a sail-boat in a sudden flaw of wind.  There is not one of these smiling ponds which has not devoured more youths and maidens than any of those monsters the ancients used to tell such lies about.  But it was a pretty pond, and never looked more innocent—­so the native “bard” of Rockland said in his elegy—­than on the morning when they found Sarah Jane and Ellen Maria floating among the lily-pads.

The Apollinean Institute, or Institoot, as it was more commonly called, was, in the language of its Prospectus, a “first-class Educational Establishment.”  It employed a considerable corps of instructors to rough out and finish the hundred young lady scholars it sheltered beneath its roof.  First, Mr. and Mrs. Peckham, the Principal and the Matron of the school.  Silas Peckham was a thorough Yankee, born on a windy part of the coast, and reared chiefly on salt-fish.  Everybody knows the type of Yankee produced by this climate and diet:  thin, as if he had been split and dried; with an ashen kind of complexion, like the tint of the food he is made of;