It was the old story.  A poor country-clergyman dies, and leaves a widow and a daughter.  In Old England the daughter would have eaten the bitter bread of a governess in some rich family.  In New England she must keep a school.  So, rising from one sphere to another, she at length finds herself the prima donna in the department of instruction in Mr. Silas Peckham’s educational establishment.

What a miserable thing it is to be poor.  She was dependent, frail, sensitive, conscientious.  She was in the power of a hard, grasping, thin-blooded, tough-fibred, trading educator, who neither knew nor cared for a tender woman’s sensibilities, but who paid her and meant to have his money’s worth out of her brains, and as much more than his money’s worth as he could get.  She was consequently, in plain English, overworked, and an overworked woman is always a sad sight,—­sadder a great deal than an overworked man, because she is so much more fertile in capacities of suffering than a man.  She has so many varieties of headache,—­sometimes as if Jael were driving the nail that killed Sisera into her temples,—­sometimes letting her work with half her brain while the other half throbs as if it would go to pieces,—­sometimes tightening round the brows as if her cap-band were a ring of iron,—­and then her neuralgias, and her backaches, and her fits of depression, in which she thinks she is nothing and less than nothing, and those paroxysms which men speak slightingly of as hysterical,—­convulsions, that is all, only not commonly fatal ones,—­so many trials which belong to her fine and mobile structure,—­that she is always entitled to pity, when she is placed in conditions which develop her nervous tendencies.

The poor young lady’s work had, of course, been doubled since the departure of Master Langdon’s predecessor.  Nobody knows what the weariness of instruction is, as soon as the teacher’s faculties begin to be overtasked, but those who have tried it.  The relays of fresh pupils, each new set with its exhausting powers in full action, coming one after another, take out all the reserved forces and faculties of resistance from the subject of their draining process.

The day’s work was over, and it was late in the evening, when she sat down, tired and faint, with a great bundle of girls’ themes or compositions to read over before she could rest her weary head on the pillow of her narrow trundle-bed, and forget for a while the treadmill stair of labor she was daily climbing.

How she dreaded this most forlorn of all a teacher’s tasks!  She was conscientious in her duties, and would insist on reading every sentence,—­there was no saying where she might find faults of grammar or bad spelling.  There might have been twenty or thirty of these themes in the bundle before her.  Of course she knew pretty well the leading sentiments they could contain:  that beauty was subject to the accidents of time; that wealth was inconstant,