As for myself, I have been thinking of late that I would become either a professional lecturer or head mistress of a great school or college for girls.  I have tried the first business a little.  Last month I delivered a lecture on Quaternions.  I got three for my audience; two came over from the Institute, and one from that men’s college which they try to make out to be a university, and where no female is admitted unless she belongs among the quadrupeds.  I enjoyed lecturing, but the subject is a difficult one, and I don’t think any one of them had any very clear notion of what I was talking about, except Rhodora,—­and I know she did n’t.  To tell the truth, I was lecturing to instruct myself.  I mean to try something easier next time.  I have thought of the Basque language and literature.  What do you say to that?

The Society goes on famously.  We have had a paper presented and read lately which has greatly amused some of us and provoked a few of the weaker sort.  The writer is that crabbed old Professor of Belles-Lettres at that men’s college over there.  He is dreadfully hard on the poor “poets,” as they call themselves.  It seems that a great many young persons, and more especially a great many young girls, of whom the Institute has furnished a considerable proportion, have taken to sending him their rhymed productions to be criticised,—­expecting to be praised, no doubt, every one of them.  I must give you one of the sauciest extracts from his paper in his own words: 

“It takes half my time to read the ‘poems’ sent me by young people of both sexes.  They would be more shy of doing it if they knew that I recognize a tendency to rhyming as a common form of mental weakness, and the publication of a thin volume of verse as prima facie evidence of ambitious mediocrity, if not inferiority.  Of course there are exceptions to this rule of judgment, but I maintain that the presumption is always against the rhymester as compared with the less pretentious persons about him or her, busy with some useful calling,—­too busy to be tagging rhymed commonplaces together.  Just now there seems to be an epidemic of rhyming as bad as the dancing mania, or the sweating sickness.  After reading a certain amount of manuscript verse one is disposed to anathematize the inventor of homophonous syllabification. [This phrase made a great laugh when it was read.] This, that is rhyming, must have been found out very early,

   “‘Where are you, Adam?’

   “‘Here am I, Madam;’

“but it can never have been habitually practised until after the Fall.  The intrusion of tintinnabulating terminations into the conversational intercourse of men and angels would have spoiled Paradise itself.  Milton would not have them even in Paradise Lost, you remember.  For my own part, I wish certain rhymes could be declared contraband of written or printed language.  Nothing should be allowed to be hurled at the world or whirled with it, or furled