find her with her wrapper on and her
"braids" and "switches" off, and she will tell you, without thinking,
what is nearer the truth--that you must excuse her, but she has a "hard
lesson to get, and she can study so much better in this way, when she
feels perfectly comfortable." A straw will tell which way the wind
blows, and straws of hair-pins, during months of pain and feebleness,
may, in after life, tell which way the wind has blown.

Just in face of some of these hindrances, in the way of the higher
education of our girls, I place some reports from schools and colleges
which I have received. The following is from a teacher of high
reputation, Superintendent of Public Schools in one of our large cities,
a gentleman who has studied the science of teaching as few have done,
and added to the usual attainments of a college graduate, studies which
would have given him a right to practise as a physician. He has now been
engaged in his profession, without a term's remission, for thirty years:

"It is not hard study that breaks down the health of our girls, but the
circumstances under which they study, the demands of society and its
thousand social follies, with all their excitements. It is the foolish
ambition of parents to have their daughters accomplished before they are
out of their teens, often allowing them to carry on five or six branches
at a time instead of two or three. These, and some other like causes, as
I think, do more towards breaking down the health of girls at school,
than much study. The ability on the part of the girls to master the
several branches, is fully equal to that of the boys, and when an amount
of study is reached that is injurious to girls, we have gone as far as
is profitable for boys. Boys also break down in study, from some of the
evils of society. As to co-education of the sexes, my experience,
observation, and reading, all convince me that it is the best way. If
there are incidental evils in such a course, they are only incidental,
and I can find those of equal, or, I think, of greater magnitude in
separate schools."

Michigan has tried the experiment of co-education perhaps as thoroughly
and extensively as any State in the Union--as any territory of equal
extent in the world. Her six colleges, her University, her Normal
school, all her higher institutions of learning--with the exception of
the Michigan Female Seminary, on the Mt. Holyoke plan, and some young
ladies' private schools--are