that dilatoriness and absences are far more frequently
excused than was once the case.

At the most fashionable, and also the best conducted school in Boston
fifty years ago, my mother was allowed no study time in school, and
committed thirty pages of history as a daily lesson. For myself, at a
time when we were pursuing languages and the higher mathematics, we took
a whole canto of Dante three times a week, and were required to give an
explanation of every historical allusion. I had no study time in school;
but neither my mother, nor myself, nor any girls in my class, were in
the least injured by anything required of us. During the whole of our
school life, we "thought and understood" as children, and very reluctant
we were to "put away childish things." We rose for a bath and walk
before a seven o'clock breakfast, nine o'clock found us at school, and
we returned to a two o'clock dinner. In the afternoon we walked, or rode
on horseback, or studied together for an hour. We took tea at six or
half past six o'clock, and the curfew ringing at nine found us
preparing for bed. We had no time for unsuitable reading, and none of
the cares or dissipations of maidenhood perplexed our straight forward
way.

If we could secure this simplicity for our children, we should have
small reason to be anxious about their health.

What, then, are the drawbacks to a teacher's efforts to-day? If girls
are not studying too hard and too much, what are they doing which stands
in the way of a true education, taking the word in the broadest sense?

The teacher's first obstacle lies in the superficial character of the
American mind. We have scarcely one in the country capable of being a
hard student. The whole nation repels the idea of drudgery of any sort,
and the most conscientious teacher has to contend against a home
influence, which, working at right angles with her own, hardly allows
any noble effort.

Next to this is inherited tendency: from fathers fevered with restless
mercantile speculation, or tossed between "bulls and bears" in Wall
street, or who allow themselves to indulge in practices which their
daughters are supposed never to know, girls inherit an "abnormal
development of the nervous system," and every fibre in their bodies
feels the "twist in the nerves."

From mothers of large families, overworn with house-work themselves, or,
still worse, fretted by the impossibility of keeping a home comfortable,
aided only by unwilli