Esther began also presently to perceive that her father had not
been entirely wrong in his estimate of a teacher's position and
experiences. It is not a path of roses that such a one has to tread;
and even the love she may bear to those she teaches, and even the
genuine love of teaching them, do not avail to make it so. Woe to the
teacher who has not those two alleviations and helps to fall back upon!
Esther soon found both; and yet she gave her father credit for having
known more about the matter than she did. She was truly alone now; the
children loved her, but scattered away from her as soon as their tasks
were done; her fellow-teachers she scarcely saw--they were busy and
jaded; and with the world outside of school she had nothing to do. She
had never had much to do with it; yet at Miss Fairbairn's she had
sometimes a little taste of society that was of high order, and all in
the house had been at least well known to her and she to them, even if
no particular congeniality had drawn them together. She had lost all
that now. And it sometimes came over Esther in those days the thought
of her English aunts and cousins, as a vision of strange pleasantness.
To have plenty of friends and relations, of one's own blood, and
therefore inalienable; well-bred and refined and cultivated (whereby I
am afraid Esther's fancy made them a multiplication of Pitt
Dallas),--it looked very alluring! She went bravely about her work, and
did it beautifully, and was very contented in it, and relieved to be
earning money; yet these visions now and again would come over her
mind, bringing a kind of distant sunshiny glow with them, different
from the light that fell on that particular bit of life's pathway she
was treading just then. They came and went; what came and did not go
was Esther's consciousness that she was earning only a little money,
and that with that little she could not clear off all the debts that
had accrued and were constantly accruing. When she had paid the
butcher, the grocer's bill presented itself, and when she had after
some delay got rid of that, then came the need for a fresh supply of
coal. Esther spent nothing on her own dress that she could help, but
her father's was another matter, and tailors' charges she found were
heavy. She went bravely on; she was young and full of spirit, and she
was a Christian and full of confidence; nevertheless she did begin to
feel the worry of these petty, gnawing, money cares, which have