winter evenings came. This was the formation of
a class for regular study, of at least one or two of the branches which
her own children had attended to at school. But these plans were
afterward merged in those of the young manufacturer.

The mill-girls, although they had generally had fair common-school
advantages before they commenced work, were, of course, from that time
totally deprived of them. They knew how to read, write, and "do
examples" in the simpler rules of arithmetic. Perhaps this would be
quite education enough for those girls who are to pass their lives in
factories of the older world. But it is not so in America, where
everybody reads and everybody thinks, where no one is stationary, no
position permanent--where the operative of to-day is the employer of
to-morrow--where many a girl steps from a position of toil and honorable
self-support into that of mistress of a mansion, and is called to
dispense a hospitality which in other lands would be called princely. In
our as yet unsettled mode of existence, education is the one thing
needful, because education is the only thing of which the "chances and
changes" of life can not strip us--the only thing which will adapt
itself gracefully to any position, from the cottage and tenement-room to
the presidential chair.

Eunice and James Mountjoy had often talked over the loss of educational
advantages to which boys and girls entering the mill at so early an age
were of necessity subjected, and this winter they took their youngest
sister into confidence. The result was the commencement of a "night
school," held, however, from four o'clock till seven. The mill was now
only working three-quarters time, so these three hours remained to be
filled up, and no one objected to putting off supper an hour for this
purpose.

The school-house did double duty--the day scholars departing just as the
more advanced classes assembled, and the trustees gladly gave the use of
the building for so beneficent a purpose. But it was not to be expected
that the poor young overworked teacher could do double duty too. She
was, in fact, only a girl, not much in advance of the "night scholars,"
either in age or acquirements, and well calculated to profit with them
by superior advantages. Another hired teacher was not to be thought of,
for the school committee were not entrusted with spare funds, and the
Mountjoys, who might have furnished a teacher's board and salary upon
ordinary occasion