e's pretty good-looking," said Sally. "I saw him on Sunday when he was
here, but he was off on Monday, and never called on old friends. Does he
write to you often?"

"Not very," said Mara; "in fact, almost never; and when he does, there
is so little in his letters."

"Well, I tell you, Mara, you must not expect fellows to write as girls
can. They don't do it. Now, our boys, when they write home, they tell
the latitude and longitude, and soil and productions, and such things.
But if you or I were only there, don't you think we should find
something more to say? Of course we should,--fifty thousand little
things that they never think of."

Mara made no reply to this, but went on very intently with her painting.
A close observer might have noticed a suppressed sigh that seemed to
retreat far down into her heart. Sally did not notice it.

What was in that sigh? It was the sigh of a long, deep, inner history,
unwritten and untold--such as are transpiring daily by thousands, and of
which we take no heed.

CHAPTER XX

REBELLION

We have introduced Mara to our readers as she appears in her seventeenth
year, at the time when she is expecting the return of Moses as a young
man of twenty; but we cannot do justice to the feelings which are roused
in her heart by this expectation, without giving a chapter or two to
tracing the history of Moses since we left him as a boy commencing the
study of the Latin grammar with Mr. Sewell. The reader must see the
forces that acted upon his early development, and what they have made of
him.

It is common for people who write treatises on education to give forth
their rules and theories with a self-satisfied air, as if a human being
were a thing to be made up, like a batch of bread, out of a given number
of materials combined by an infallible recipe. Take your child, and do
thus and so for a given number of years, and he comes out a thoroughly
educated individual.

But in fact, education is in many cases nothing more than a blind
struggle of parents and guardians with the evolutions of some strong,
predetermined character, individual, obstinate, unreceptive, and seeking
by an inevitable law of its being to develop itself and gain free
expression in its own way. Captain Kittridge's confidence that he would
as soon undertake a boy as a Newfoundland pup, is good for those whose
idea of what is to be done for a human being are only what would be done
for a dog, namely, give food,