Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and Men

[133] nor is it easy to fancy the dignity of a pedagogue more completely collapsed than when he lies on his back in a snow-drift, and gazes upward on a triumphant windowful of grinning boys. This was the final situation in that school; and there was a summer of hopeless doubt as to what teacher to put in for the winter season again approaching. At last a veteran member, who rarely opened his lips, parted them for this brief proposition, “Let's appoint Miss Blank” --naming a well-known teacher of the centre district. “Can she manage that school?” asked some one. “She can manage any school,” was the brief and decisive response. Miss Blank was accordingly put in, and in a few weeks the very boys who had ejected her predecessor were searching the woods for ground-pine with which to deck her school-room. She had applied a finer force.

And this finer force has the interest of being in a manner an American patent. In France and Germany, Mr. Matthew Arnold's reports tell us, the school-mistress is a rare phenomenon, and is never assigned to a school for both sexes, except for the very youngest children. In England, under the recent school laws, she is becoming more abundant; but even there, not long since, her social position was so humble that Miss Jean Ingelow, in her “Studies for stories,” seriously blames an ambitious young woman with not being content with