Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays

[22] too intolerable to be borne. French was taught by his eldest daughter, an excellent woman, though she sometimes had a way of tapping little boys on the head with her thimble; and mathematics we received from a succession of Harvard students, thimbleless. For a time, one fair girl, Mary Story — William Story's sister, and afterwards Mrs. George Ticknor Curtis --glided in to her desk in the corner, that she might recite Virgil with the older class.

But in general the ill effect of a purely masculine world was very manifest in the school, and my lifelong preference for co-education was largely based upon what I saw there. I could not help noticing-and indeed observed the same thing in another boarding-school, where I taught at a later day — the greater refinement, and I may say civilization, of the day-scholars, who played with their sisters at home, as compared with those little exiles who had no such natural companionship. I must not forget one almost romantic aspect of the school in the occasional advent of Spanish boys, usually from Porto Rico, who were as good as dime novels to us, with their dark skins and sonorous names,--Victoriano Rosello, Magin Rigual, Pedro Mangual. They swore superb Spanish oaths, which we naturally borrowed; and they once or twice drew knives upon one another, with