ATH.

(_Last of the Parentheses_.)

Yes, that was my last walk with the _schoolmistress_. It happened to be
the end of a term; and before the next began, a very nice young woman,
who had been her assistant, was announced as her successor, and she was
provided for elsewhere. So it was no longer the school-mistress that I
walked with, but--Let us not be in unseemly haste. I shall call her the
schoolmistress still; some of you love her under that name.

----When it became known among the boarders that two of their number
had joined hands to walk down the long path of life side by side, there
was, as you may suppose, no small sensation. I confess I pitied our
landlady. It took her all of a suddin,--she said. Had not known that we
was keepin' company, and never mistrusted anything partic'lar. Ma'am
was right to better herself. Didn't look very rugged to take care of a
family, but could get hired haaelp, she calc'lated.--The great maternal
instinct came crowding up in her soul just then, and her eyes wandered
until they settled on her daughter.

----No, poor, dear woman,--that could not have been. But I am dropping
one of my internal tears for you, with this pleasant smile on my face
all the time.

The great mystery of God's providence is the permitted crushing out of
flowering instincts. Life is maintained by the respiration of oxygen
and of sentiments. In the long catalogue of scientific cruelties there
is hardly anything quite so painful to think of as that experiment of
putting an animal under the bell of an air-pump and exhausting the air
from it. [I never saw the accursed trick performed. _Laus Deo_] There
comes a time when the souls of human beings, women, perhaps, more even
than men, begin to faint for the atmosphere of the affections they were
made to breathe. Then it is that Society places its transparent
bell-glass over the young woman who is to be the subject of one of its
fatal experiments. The element by which only the heart lives is sucked
out of her crystalline prison. Watch her through its transparent
