he common.

In fine ladies' schools, I can not assert that the shameful economy of
buying inferior provisions, and the shameful indifference as to how they
were cooked, which prevail in so many boys' schools, were to be
found--but a fault almost equally great prevailed too generally. There
was not _enough_. These growing girls, stimulated to most unnatural
exertions both of body and mind, peculiarly unnatural to growing girls
who require so much care, fresh air, exercise, and rest, for their due
development--these young things had very rarely nearly so much to eat as
they could have eaten.

Sometimes enough was literally not set before them; at others, a sort of
fashion in the school to consider a good appetite as a proof of
coarseness, greediness, and vulgarity, worked but too effectually upon
these sensitive creatures. A girl at that age would rather be starved
than ridiculed or sneered at for eating.

But in boys' schools--expensive boys' schools too--where six times as
much was paid for a boy's board as would have boarded him--either
through scandalous parsimony, or the most inexcusable negligence, he had
seen meat brought into the house not fit to eat; cheap and bad in
itself, but rendered doubly unwholesome in summer by the most utter
carelessness as to whether it was fresh. Boys are hardy things, and it
is right they should not be accustomed to be too nice; but wholesome,
plain roast and boiled is what they pay for and ought to have; and the
defrauding them of what is so necessary to health, vigor, and even
intellect, in this unprincipled manner, is almost the very worst form of
robbery any man can be guilty of.

Fisher was resolved it should not be so in his wife's house. He and his
wife had agreed that the young ladies she employed should be lodged and
boarded under her roof, unless they had respectable parents who could
and would be fully answerable for them; and they should have a plentiful
and a pleasant table--that he was resolved upon. As he was competent to
little else, he took this matter upon himself. He calculated what ought
fairly to be laid out, and he laid it all out. He would not economize a
penny. If he was able to make a good bargain with his butcher, the young
ladies, not he, should have the benefit of it all. They should have a
bit of fish, or a little poultry, or a little good fruit, poor girls, to
vary a meal, to which they could not bring the sturdy appetite of much
out-of-door exercise.