handed to anxious parents (like you, Dolorosus):--"Here, most worthy
tax-payer, is the dilapidated residue of your beloved Angelina; take her
to the sea-shore for a few weeks, and make the most of her."

Do not you know that foreigners, coming from the contemplation of races
less precociously intellectual, see the danger we are in, if we do not?
I was struck by the sudden disappointment of an enthusiastic English
teacher, (Mr. Calthrop,) who visited the New York schools the other day
and got a little behind the scenes. "If I wanted a stranger to believe
that the Millennium was not far off," he said, "I would take him to some
of those grand ward-schools in New York, where able heads are trained by
the thousand. I spent four or five days in doing little else than going
through these truly wonderful schools. I staid more than three hours in
one of them, wondering at all I saw, admiring the stately order, the
unbroken discipline of the whole arrangements, and the wonderful
quickness and intelligence of the scholars. That same evening I went to
see a friend, whose daughter, a child of thirteen, was at one of these
schools. I examined her, and found that the little girl could hold her
own with many of larger growth. 'Did she go to school to-day?' asked I.
'No,' was the answer, 'she has not been for some time, as she was
beginning to get quite a serious curvature of the spine; so now she goes
regularly to a gymnastic doctor!'"

I am sure that we have all had the same experience. How exciting it was,
last year, to be sure, to see Angelina at the grammar-school
examination, multiplying mentally 351,426 by 236,145, and announcing the
result in two minutes and thirteen seconds as 82,987,492,770! I
remember how you stood trembling as she staggered under the monstrous
load, and how your cheek hung out the red flag of parental exultation
when she can out safe. But when I looked at her colorless visage, sharp
features, and shiny consumptive skin, I groaned inwardly. It seemed as
if that crop of figures, like the innumerable florets of the whiteweed,
now overspreading your paternal farm, were exhausting the last vitality
from a shallow soil. What a pity it is that the Deity gave to these
children of ours bodies as well as brains! How it interferes with
thorough instruction in the languages and the sciences! You remember the
negro-trader in "Uncle Tom," who sighs for a lot of negroes specially
constructed for his convenience, with the s