ed blood,--then glancing from me to the
living rows of benches with such a cold, sarcastic smile.

"What a barbarous, unfeeling monster!" perhaps I hear some one exclaim.

No, he was not. He could be very kind and indulgent. He had been kind
and generous to me. He gave me my tuition, and had taken unwearied pains
with my lessons. He could forgive great offences, but had no toleration
for little follies. He really thought it a sinful waste of time to write
poetry in school. He had given me a subject for composition, a useful,
practical one, but not at all to my taste, and I had ventured to
disregard it. I had jumped over the rock, and climbed up to the flowers
that grew above it. He was a thorough mathematician, a celebrated
grammarian, a renowned geographer and linguist, but I then thought he
had no more ear for poetry or music, no more eye for painting,--the
painting of God, or man,--than the stalled ox, or the Greenland seal. I
did him injustice, and he was unjust to me. I had not intended to slight
or scorn the selection he had made, but I could not write upon it,--I
could not help my thoughts flowing into rhyme.

Can the stream help gliding and rippling through its flowery margins?
Can the bird help singing and warbling upward into the deep blue sky,
sending down a silver shower of melody as it flies?

Perhaps some may think I am swelling small things into great; but
incidents and actions are to be judged by their results, by their
influence in the formation of character, and the hues they reflect on
futurity. Had I received encouragement instead of rebuke, praise instead
of ridicule,--had he taken me by the hand and spoken some such kindly
words as these:--

"This is very well for a little girl like you. Lift up that downcast
face, nor blush and tremble, as if detected in a guilty act. You must
not spend too much time in the reveries of imagination, for this is a
working-day world, my child. Even the birds have to build their nests,
and the coral insect is a mighty laborer. The gift of song is sweet, and
may be made an instrument of the Creator's glory. The first notes of the
lark are feeble, compared to his heaven-high strains. The fainter dawn
precedes the risen day."

Oh! had he addressed me in indulgent words as these, who knows but that,
like burning Sappho, I might have sang as well as loved? Who knows but
that the golden gates of the Eden of immortality might have opened to
admit the wandering Peri to