This composition was written in a singular, sharp-pointed, long, slender hand, on a kind of wavy, ribbed paper.  There was something strangely suggestive about the look of it, but exactly of what, Miss barley either could not or did not try to think.  The subject of the paper was The Mountain,—­the composition being a sort of descriptive rhapsody.  It showed a startling familiarity with some of the savage scenery of the region.  One would have said that the writer must have threaded its wildest solitudes by the light of the moon and stars as well as by day.  As the teacher read on, her color changed, and a kind of tremulous agitation came over her.  There were hints in this strange paper she did not know what to make of.  There was something in its descriptions and imagery that recalled,—­Miss Darley could not say what,—­but it made her frightfully nervous.  Still she could not help reading, till she came to one passage which so agitated her, that the tired and over-wearied girl’s self-control left her entirely.  She sobbed once or twice, then laughed convulsively; and flung herself on the bed, where she worked out a set hysteric spasm as she best might, without anybody to rub her hands and see that she did not hurt herself.

By and by she got quiet, rose and went to her bookcase, took down a volume of Coleridge, and read a short time, and so to bed, to sleep and wake from time to time with a sudden start out of uneasy dreams.

Perhaps it is of no great consequence what it was in the composition which set her off into this nervous paroxysm.  She was in such a state that almost any slight agitation would have brought on the attack, and it was the accident of her transient excitability, very probably, which made a trifling cause the seeming occasion of so much disturbance.  The theme was signed, in the same peculiar, sharp, slender hand, E. Venner, and was, of course, written by that wild-looking girl who had excited the master’s curiosity and prompted his question, as before mentioned.  The next morning the lady-teacher looked pale and wearied, naturally enough, but she was in her place at the usual hour, and Master Langdon in his own.

The girls had not yet entered the school room.

“You have been ill, I am afraid,” said Mr. Bernard.

“I was not well yesterday,” she, answered.  “I had a worry and a kind of fright.  It is so dreadful to have the charge of all these young souls and bodies.  Every young girl ought to walk locked close, arm in arm, between two guardian angels.  Sometimes I faint almost with the thought of all that I ought to do, and of my own weakness and wants.—­Tell me, are there not natures born so out of parallel with the lines of natural law that nothing short of a miracle can bring them right?”

Mr. Bernard had speculated somewhat, as all thoughtful persons of his profession are forced to do, on the innate organic tendencies with which individuals, families, and races are born.  He replied, therefore, with a smile, as one to whom the question suggested a very familiar class of facts.