and existence uncertain; that virtue was its own reward; that youth exhaled, like the dewdrop from the flower, ere the sun had reached its meridian; that life was o’ershadowed with trials; that the lessons of virtue instilled by our beloved teachers were to be our guides through all our future career.  The imagery employed consisted principally of roses, lilies, birds, clouds, and brooks, with the celebrated comparison of wayward genius to meteor.  Who does not know the small, slanted, Italian hand of these girls’-compositions, their stringing together of the good old traditional copy-book phrases; their occasional gushes of sentiment, their profound estimates of the world, sounding to the old folks that read them as the experience of a bantam pullet’s last-hatched young one with the chips of its shell on its head would sound to a Mother Cary’s chicken, who knew the great ocean with all its typhoons and tornadoes?  Yet every now and then one is liable to be surprised with strange clairvoyant flashes, that can hardly be explained, except by the mysterious inspiration which every now and then seizes a young girl and exalts her intelligence, just as hysteria in other instances exalts the sensibility,—­a little something of that which made Joan of Arc, and the Burney girl who prophesied “Evelina,” and the Davidson sisters.  In the midst of these commonplace exercises which Miss Darley read over so carefully were two or three that had something of individual flavor about them, and here and there there was an image or an epithet which showed the footprint of a passionate nature, as a fallen scarlet feather marks the path the wild flamingo has trodden.

The young lady-teacher read them with a certain indifference of manner, as one reads proofs—­noting defects of detail, but not commonly arrested by the matters treated of.  Even Miss Charlotte Ann Wood’s poem, beginning—­

          “How sweet at evening’s balmy hour,”

did not excite her.  She marked the inevitable false rhyme of Cockney and Yankee beginners, morn and dawn, and tossed the verses on the pile of papers she had finished.  She was looking over some of the last of them in a rather listless way,—­for the poor thing was getting sleepy in spite of herself,—­when she came to one which seemed to rouse her attention, and lifted her drooping lids.  She looked at it a moment before she would touch it.  Then she took hold of it by one corner and slid it off from the rest.  One would have said she was afraid of it, or had some undefined antipathy which made it hateful to her.  Such odd fancies are common enough in young persons in her nervous state.  Many of these young people will jump up twenty times a day and run to dabble the tips of their fingers in water, after touching the most inoffensive objects.