On Schoolgirls

I

BOYS get more than their fair share of attention; for up to these happier days the advent of the man child has been accepted as the climax of joyous arrival. Girls have been less considered. Even the psychologists have not revealed all the secrets of girlhood. So the father, uncle, bachelor cousin, or new-fledged schoolmaster, who suddenly finds the girl a subject of absorbing interest, does not know how to eke out the scanty knowledge he gathers from his own observations. When this object of absorbing interest reaches the age of eight, the difficulties of the analyst multiply; for then girls go different ways. Most girls go to school; some of them are taught at home; and in Catholic countries not a few are bred at a convent. The convent-bred girl is in the main beyond the boundaries of our American experience; while the home-bred girl is usually a sort of experiment, dependent upon out-of-theway circumstances, and adds little to our general knowledge.

Of all girls bred at home, Miranda is the fairest flower. In her Shakespeare’s genius reveals itself in its most exejuisite delicacy; here he has dipped his brush in the dews of the morning, when they reflect, not the rosy-red and gold of Aurora, but the radiant essence of light in its fresh virginal candor. Miranda is the daybreak of maidenhood. In delineating her character Shakespeare must have remembered his own break-of-day thoughts when he first saw Anne Hathaway look forth from her cottage window, and how he drank deep of that blithe air, with his boyish confidence in a brave, beautiful, unspotted world. Miranda was educated at home. It may seem pedantic, — Ferdinand was probably pedantic in reckoning up Miranda’s perfections, — but I have taken the trouble to count somewhat roughly the number of words she speaks. They are some nine hundred and sixty: about three pages of an ordinary book. There is a lesson! A maid may be bred at home, by her father, not speak above a thousand words, and those all poetry, and the world of men will adore her: ‘Admired Miranda! Indeed the top of admiration!’ She did not go out into the world, establishing temperance restaurants for Stephano and Trinculo, horticultural societies to teach Caliban how to garden, or associations for the promulgation of physiological secrecies. She lived in her father’s cell, and yet, like a lighthouse, she renders the narrow channel through the shoals where the Sirens dwell, a path of light and safety for many a ‘ Tempest’reading young mariner.

But girls bred in a convent and girls bred at home are not like most schoolgirls ; and, if we are after a knowledge of the schoolgirl, studying the ways and dispositions of convent-bred girls and home-bred girls will not help us. Miranda was an open book to Prospero; the girl in a convent may be thoroughly know n to the abbess and to the father confessor ; but who knows the schoolgirl? The convent system has been elaborately devised by a long line of deep-thinking churchmen for the very purpose of making girls understandable, of shaping their minds and hearts, so that abbesses and father confessors shall be able to classify them readily into genera and species. But our school system has not aimed to make schoolgirls intelligible. It aims at many things, but not at that. The schoolgirl is a type of her own, and somewhat of an enigma.

I had a friend once Whom the chances of life threw for a time into sudden acquaintance with schoolgirls. He wished to make conscientious preparation for the intimacy. He inquired distractedly for some book that might help him. Why had not Herr Baedeker prepared a winter’s trip in this unguidebooked region? It was a momentous adventure and very bewildering. He had some experience of men, women, boys, and little children, but none of girls, and the prospect of this intimacy rose before him like the prospect of a journey in the Arabian Nights. He betook himself to novels in search of information; but novels are useless — they rarely take up a girl’s life until past the age interesting to him. Becky Sharp’s stay at Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies merely served to show that Thackeray had been nonplussed by the riddle. Novelists fight shy of girlhood; it is a world still uncharted. The child, the poet says, is father to the man; but a little girl is not the mother of the schoolgirl, nor is the débutante the schoolgirl’s daughter. There is no such sequence of relations. The impulses, emotions, thoughts, acts, of a schoolgirl issue from some undiscovered source, mysteriously disobedient to ordinary human procedure; very much as the molecules of a vivacious gas snap their fingers at the law of gravitation.

No wonder novelists keep away. Scott never mentions a schoolgirl. Imagine Thomas Hardy fashioning a schoolgirl out of Wessex clay, or George Meredith venturing to describe Diana of the Crossways in those early years. Arnold Bennett would have created a little miniature old wife, as Van Eyck and Memling paint babies like miniature old men. H. G. Wells would depict her as incipient temptation to lead Mr. Britling, for instance, into one of a dozen romantic adventures. Galsworthy would try to fit her into an ethical system, into a niche of social justice or matrimonial ventures. Mr. Howells, one may imagine, might have essayed the task; but he would have tried to meet the difficulty of getting the right values — as a painter dabs blues on yellows to make a green — by adding to a primness, reminiscent of the Vicar of Wakefield, a few delicate hoydenish touches. As there is no such thing as a schoolgirl on the Continent, French and Italian novelists do not mention her. Indeed the schoolgirl, as we see her, is an American product and modern. Had his perturbation permitted my adventurous friend to remember this, he would have been spared rummaging through classical novels.

II

The first step in understanding a schoolgirl is to cut loose from all preconceived ideas concerning little girls on the one hand and young ladies on the other. There are, as I have said, no causal relations to be found there. The schoolgirl’s character does not proceed from her character as a little girl; it is the creation of inner forces that express themselves virtually unaffected by earlier experiences. After the lapse of a few years she will grow into a woman; but there again her womanly character will not spring from her schoolgirl character, or but in a minor degree; the earlier and later periods of a girl’s life depend no doubt upon her individual experiences, but the schoolgirl period is of a different order. To understand a girl at that stage one must take a different path.

My adventurous friend, after vainly seeking information from novels, from books on adolescence and pedagogy, then questioned parents as to their own daughters. This, he found, was the maddest plan. To parents the schoolgirl is a daughter, a member of the family, an ethical, social creature, and to be treated as such; she is to be stuffed with certain kinds of information got from books, and to be limbered into a certain physical and mental dexterity. They wish her either to learn from what they deem their successes and become like themselves, or to learn from their failures and in such respects to be unlike themselves. They remember what used to be taught young girls thirty years ago; and although they endeavor to make allowance for the changes that go with time,—physiology they know has superseded the piano, and deportment has given way to basketball, — still they see, in their mind’s eye, the girl at the end of her school life behaving as her mother would now behave if a weight of years were suddenly to be lifted away. They have no idea of a schoolgirl; they know ‘our daughter Emily,’ or ‘our daughter Jane’ — girls more or less satisfactory, but not the two schoolgirls who call them father and mother. Moreover, parents are always agitated and emotional about their daughters; some are proud, some are tremulous, but none are judicial. Parents were of no greater use than novelists as a source of information.

The next step was to consult teachers; but most women teachers had accepted so completely, in all its manifestations, the prevailing theory of the emancipation of women, and were so occupied with the business of assimilating opportunities and duties, so concerned with their function of codifying and imposing the gifts of liberty, that they bothered themselves but little with the actual character of a schoolgirl. To them she was a prospective citizen.

My acquaintance had nothing to do but put his hands in his pockets and think, starting from some clue other than those offered by novelist, parent, or schoolma’am. He pondered over the problem. The problem of a school evidently was to superintend girls during the six or seven years of the awkward age, when home confesses itself inadequate, and keep them occupied. The age of the girl was of the essence of the problem. But a girl at home and a girl at school are two very different things; it was therefore obvious that School itself— the gathering together at appointed hours, studying together, reciting together, walking through corridors and up and down stairs together, the special facilities for giggles, and so forth — counted, and counted heavily. Mob psychology had something to tell. But behind all was the staring fact that the schoolgirl had little or nothing in common with the girl she had been at home in earlier years, or the young woman she would be a little later. Such a breach of psychological and physiological concatenations implied a nonhuman element. The schoolmaster adventurer bethought himself of ghosts (a foolish thought), and then of all he had ever read about fairies, pixies, elves, naiads, dryads, bacchantes, Pan.

The opening day came. The adventurer was unprepared, and was doing his best to make a virtue of unpreparedness. It was scientific to approach facts with no preliminary theory, to avoid wronging them on first acquaintance by a twist this way or that. The school assembled; the girls came in. They were talking, laughing, whispering, giggling, humming, murmuring, making all noises, from articulate speech to the rustle of long grasses on an upland by the sea. They walked, some decorously, some sedately, some quickly, some hurriedly, some tripping and skipping, one after the other, or two together arm-in-arm, at times three or even four trying to walk abreast in a space barely comfortable for two — swaying and wavering this way and that way, like ripples swept round a corner by a swift tide. The adventurer felt eyes upon him, as if he had entered unbidden into a fairy wood. He remembered Actæon, then Bottom the Weaver; the latter analogy seemed more appropriate, and instinctively he clapped his hands to his ears.

The bell rang. Somebody said something about prayers. Round his head the adventurer seemed to hear the hovering wings of Cobweb, Peaseblossom, Mustardseed, and Moth, evidently spiritual emanations from the assembled school: ‘Hail, mortal, hail!’ The fairies questioned him all at once (more from curiosity, it seemed, than from a wish to mark him for an intruder), as to how he happened to be there. Had he lost his way, had he fed on honeydew or drunk the milk of paradise; had he listened to the whippoorwill or followed a will-o’-the-wisp? They were all solicitude. The adventurer looked up out of what should have been his prayers: more and more eyes seemed to be fixed on him. They say in the country that if you make a habit of looking for four-leaved clovers you will find them everywhere; this may be a saying with a moral. The adventurer felt that he was surrounded by four-leaved clovers; that good luck was lurking all about, looking furtively out of black eyes, brown eyes, blue eyes, gray eyes; good luck whispering in rustles and noises like the woodland noises made by little pattering, nimble, fugitive creatures. He had been right: there was an element of the fairy in the schoolgirl. He seemed to hear himself ask, —

and their answer, —

then another voice, —

There was no doubt about it, the non-human element in the schoolgirl was fairy. After the bell had rung and the girls had marched out sedately, as if the Bible had exorcised all elfin influences, he wondered that this fact had not been discovered before. Preconceived theories had blindfolded the adult world. The girls were well aware that something, unknown of adults, animated them. The adventurer perceived that the school itself — curriculum, desks, blackboards — was but the bed of a mountain brook, rough, rocky, irregular, the product of past forces, bare and pebbled; and then, when the wizard hidden in the clock struck the magic number nine, sonic dam gave way, and the waters came tumbling down, foaming, bubbling, tossing, falling, chattering, laughing, bounding, each drop leaping out into the sunshine to flash in rainbow hues, and then tumble into the quiet gray-green pool below, where, after the verses from the Bible were read, the still waters made believe that they had never foamed or gurgled in their lives.

Certainly there was a fairy element in the schoolgirl. An acquaintance with individual girls confirmed the hypothesis; they moved and spoke and smiled quite beyond the power of mere mortals. Anybody versed in fairy lore could have discovered it from the mere motions of their fingers. The fairy within is very shy: it tries to conceal its identity. It. bewitches a girl to bite her nails, munch lead pencils; it bobs her head, it tosses back her hair, it makes her wriggle and shuffle; it makes her seem to be all feet and hands. Naturally the fairy within has been hard to find, but from the earliest generations the old and crotchety have sought to find it.

It was a curious prejudice of the Jewish religion — for in this respect early Christianity was purely Jewish — to confound fairies with idols and heathendom generally. Perhaps this was because of the narrow illiberality of the Jewish religion, perhaps because the people of the Old Testament cared so little for children. One gets the impression that Elisha and the she-bears were typical of the self-respecting, orthodox Jew of those days. The miracle of the New Testament was to denounce all such respectability. The most eloquent passage to persuade men to desire to be good and go to Heaven, in all the Christian oratory of the world, is the speech of Jesus, ‘Suffer little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.’

There seems, at first sight at least, to be some relationship between the fairy spirit in the schoolgirl and the Kingdom-of-Heavenly spirit in the little child.

After the first recitation, belief in this fairy spirit became a conviction. The mind of a schoolgirl does not proceed like the mind of an adult; it imitates the motions of a grasshopper. It sings in the summer, it dances in the winter, it transforms values, it doubts axioms, it is dogmatic upon impossibilities or what seem such to the adult mind, it compresses dreams into a creed, it has intuitions like the flash of an electric candle, or it plays the bat, shuts its eyes tight in broad daylight, folds its wings, hooks on to any convenient excuse, and goes fast asleep. The hypothesis passed out of the realm of theory — where Darwinism and Mendel’s law hopelessly linger — into the realm of established fact.

III

A longer experience, however, rendered it less certain that the fairy element, although there beyond all cavil, did really come direct from heaven. At times it almost seemed to the adventurer that the Christian fathers were right, and that the fairy element —whether in naiad, dryad, sea-goddess, water-nymph, or schoolgirl — bears a close similarity to powers that manifest themselves in less attractive ways. If matter is indestructible, certainly spiritual force is indestructible, and that same unknown power that revealed itself in Puck, in Pan, or hamadryad, to children wandering in Attic groves at dusk, and in more wayward humor to the misogynist hermits of the Thebaïd, must be somewhere about to-day. Forces persist; names and definitions change. Ares and Aphrodite — call them sociological complexes if you prefer — are as potent as ever, and Æolus, with or without any intelligible reason, lets loose the winds of heaven.

There must be a curious learning in following old gods, old customs, old words, down their labyrinthine course through twenty centuries. The Christian fathers did their best to exorcise these manifestations of evil with prayers, holy water, and ceremonies perilously similar to heathen incantations; later, priests expelled them with bell, book, and candle. There were many ingenious devices to keep off evil spirits. Ghosts fled at the crowing of the cock; so did Robin Goodfellow. The sign of the cross was a familiar remedy. The White Lady of Avenel was made harmless by a sprig of holly. As time went on, the rites of exorcism became more sophisticated. Fasting, prayer, vigils, holy thoughts, pious practices, were gradually, especially in the hands of Jesuits, formulated, scheduled, refined, and converted into what is hardly more than training the character. As the powers of good have been reduced to social impulses, so the powers of evil have been degraded from demons to appetites, and fairies from their high elfin estate to inferiorities in attention, memory, or association of ideas. Forces persist, definitions change; our inability to comprehend a force makes us very high-handed with its name. As names and definitions for these fairies or evil spirits have changed, there has been for the most part a corresponding change in the rites of exorcism; but in one particular these rites exhibit a special and peculiar continuity.

The fairy element in the schoolgirl was recognized, of course, in early days; and as education was in the hands of the priests, it became part of the priestly function to exorcise that element. The priests handled — if I may use the term — instruction, the confessional, homilies, exhortations, and exorcisms. Naturally some confusion arose in these ministrations. So far as the girls ware concerned, it made no difference whether instruction, homilies, and exorcisms, when administered in a lump, were to discipline the character, train the mind, cultivate the memory, or banish the fairy spirit, or to do all at once. But this confusion wrought havoc with the theory of education. The consequence is that rites which were originally part of an exorcising ceremony have now taken their place in the regular school curriculum.

The good old priests, finding a girl flighty, inattentive, forgetful, or benumbed by her lessons, resorted to exorcism. Just what should be the proper charms, unless divine grace should condescend to reveal them, had to be found out by experience. Experience showed that the fairy or evil spirit, whichever it might be, was most distressed by algebra and grammar. A girl untenanted by an evil spirit was docile, eager at her books, diligent, attentive, punctual, tidy; such a girl accepted algebra and grammar as she did bread, butter, and junket. The inference was that these potent charms had either expelled the evil spirit or kept it away; holy water had not proved half so efficacious. But if, during the ritual of algebra or grammar, the girl’s mind wandered, if she began to yawn and blink, if she answered at random and kept repeating, ‘I don’t follow,’ ‘I forget,’ ‘I don’t know,’ that was a sure sign that there was an indwelling spirit sorely vexed by the charm. So algebra and grammar were applied with renewed vigor; and, as I have said, by a confusion of ideas they were transferred from the shelf of exorcisms to the shelves of schoolbooks.

The objection to these spells or studies is that they do not really perform their function; they do not exorcise. They are tests, no one doubts, of the presence of an evil or fairy spirit; for where there is no fairy spirit they are welcome, and where there is a fairy spirit they are not welcome. The old explanation, juxta hoc ergo propter hoc, was erroneous, the bald fact being that a girl without any elfin qualities took kindly to algebra and grammar, while the girl cursed or blessed with them did not. This employment of algebra and grammar in the education of the young should occupy our antiquarians, and, when explained by their learning, would shed much light on human development. In the meantime I can only hazard guesses. Algebra was probably seized on by a monkish priesthood as the best simple study that dealt with the abstract, for the power of abstraction lies at the base of the art of contemplation; and it was hoped that, by a devout concentration on the abstract,—x or y, or beauty or infinity, — the novice would gradually learn to become -a contemplative. Grammar probably obtained its hold by analogy. Grammar is the patient, obsequious process of observing how men who write books that please make their paragraphs, sentences, clauses, and punctuation, and of noting down and codifying such observations; this process bears a marked analogy to the necromancer’s habit of culling simples and squeezing their juices into a concoction believed efficacious to expel tormenting spirits.

The melancholy aspect of this is that the difference of opinion between persons who desire to continue to use these exorcising studies and persons who do not, comes down, not to a theory of training the intelligence, disciplining the character, cultivating the memory, but to a matter of taste. Some like the fairy element in schoolgirls; others (and most teachers range themselves in this camp) do not. Teachers are a busy, overworked body; they do not like to have Ariel misguide them this way or that, or Puck indulge in tomfoolery at their expense. Who can blame them?

George Sand, in her Histoire de ma Vie, tells of the rather simple plan by which one of her schoolfellows at the convent, according to her own account, managed to leave the schoolroom without resorting to fibs or specious pretexts, Hers was a nobler way, but hurried teachers may be excused for not being primarily affected by its nobler aspect. The girl said, ‘I go out, I come back. They ask questions, I don’t answer. They punish me, I don’t care, and I do just what I like.’

GEORGE SAND. — That would suit me.

MARY. — Will you be one of the Imps then?

GEORGE SAND. — I should like to be.

MARY. — As much of one as me?

GEORGE SAND. — Just as much.

MARY. — It’s a bargain.

GEORGE SAND. — How many diables (imps) are there in the class?

MARY. — Not many just at present. There’s Isabelle, Sophie, and us two. All the others are hetes or sages.

Teachers are usually nervous, undernourished, overconscientious, and naturally prefer stupids and goodygoodies — bêtes and sages — to girls possessed of an impish spirit; it was inevitable that any study whose roots lie in exorcism should be cherished and preserved.

To those, on the other hand (and there are some teachers here, too), who like the fairy element, that element is most delightful. It suggests to them running waters, odors of carnations blown across beds of forget-me-nots, sunlight on icicles, toys in a toyshop, conserves in a grocer’s window, Christmas trees, pulling molasses candy, gathering chestnuts, a gallop on the beach at Santa Barbara, and all the firstlings of spring.

IV

The adventurer felt that in adopting the fairy hypothesis he was on sure ground; but there is something more, as he perceived, in the schoolgirl than the fairy spirit. There must be something that diables, bêtes, and sages possess in common. Their common element is youth; that is the glory of the young, and to have once possessed it is also the glory of the middle-aged and the old.

But once to have been a king is very different from being a king. In this period of dethronement, of crooked eclipse, men grow cynical. They find life insipid, they see no meaning in the daily round—getting-up, shaving, brushing teeth, bath, breakfast, business, luncheon, business, dinner, sleep, getting-up, shaving, brushing teeth, bath. These successions of happenings are like the gyrations of a squirrel’s cage—motion, motion, motion, no advance. There is no salt in life. The sense of automatism rises like a miasma, chokes the breath, stifles the nostrils, dulls the brain. Glassy eyes meet glassy eyes. What a preposterous ado about nothing! Heavy weights hold down the feet, heavy weights puli down the hands. The more of noise in life, the greater its emptiness. Kings, captains of industry, leaders of finance, eloquent preachers, cunning politicians, are more senseless than the rest; they too get up, shave, brush teeth, bathe, breakfast, and play the fool like everybody else. They give orders to a thousand men, they influence tens of thousands, they heap up gold, they build palaces, they lay out pleasure-grounds, they bow, nod, smile, and listen to the clapping of a hundred thousand hands: but why do they do these foolish things, why make all these grimaces? To-morrow will light these fools to dusty death.

Left to themselves, the old and middle-aged become cynics, misanthropes, blasphemers. We are all automata, trundled onward steadily, willy-nilly, in the wheelbarrow of Time, to be dumped at last into the pit. What a horror of a world! What a creation of demons! There is no trace of beneficent deity here; it is the doing of Satan and his crew. How got they the power? They must have been preparing their munitions and Krupp factories for æons beforehand; and then, when they rebelled, there must have been terrible fighting in heaven. Milton says, —

The battle could hardly have ended in a victory for heaven. In all histories of wars the historian is affected by patriotic bias, and claims victory for his side. We have never read Belial’s narrative of those aerial campaigns. What happened was this. Instead of a fight to a finish, the pacifists in heaven had their way. A treaty of everlasting peace was made. The devils were at liberty to do their devilish will, to create this world, to people it with men and women, to render flesh heir to every ill that the wantonest imps could devise (and the little imps were amazingly ingenious), and even to set Death in the midst upon a throne, with crown and sceptre. When this stipulation was read out, the peace commissioners for the angels, Michael, Raphael and Uriel, were much criticized in Heaven. Cries of shame rose from various parts of the blessed regions, and the unborn soul of George Washington moved that it be rejected; much better, he said, to renew the war. Raphael said, ‘Wait!’ and read aloud the next article: ‘But it is hereby mutually agreed by and between the High Contracting Powers that the Lord God upon the earth, at such times and places as He shall choose, may create children.’ It was true, Raphael admitted, that children in course of time will grow up into men and women and become subject to all the ills of existence, but for a season they shall be children. The speaker was requested to be more explicit and describe to the angels what children were. So the glorious archangel spread his wings for a rood, lifted up his great right hand that showed like lightning arrested in its flash, drew aside the curtain of fate, and revealed to the assembled angels the future of the world. ‘There,’ he said, ‘behold the power of the Lord God! ’

All the host of Heaven gazed into the future and beheld the work of the devils — the earth, and men and women walking to and fro, aimless, dejected, sorrowful automata, repeating day by day their inane motions (work, food, sleep, work, food, sleep), — financiers, lawyers, railroad managers, professors, playwrights, carpenters, miners, politicians, robbers, suffragettes, reformers, — all blank, disconsolate, sordid, empty of meaning; and the collective grin of ten thousand demons played like a limelight upon them.

Then of a sudden, sounds as of flutes in a mountain valley when the melted snow trickles to the roots of the mayflowers, sounds of bobolinks meeting and greet ing in a Connecticut meadow, sounds of Cimarosaon ’cello and violin, sounds of little stirring creatures in Canadian woods, crackle of twigs under the hoofs of leaping deer, tinkling of waterfalls, ripples on Loch Lomond, song of the nightingale, —

sounds that had never before been heard in the Kingdom of Heaven, music of voices, of footsteps on the stairs, of babies cooing and creeping, of little girls babbling and laughing, of boys come home from school. And all the angels in heaven held their breath, while down their cheeks trickled tears of joy, and with one accord they all knelt down and worshiped the Lord God; and on earth men and women knelt down and raised their voices in thanksgiving and praise, and worshiped the visible revelation of the goodness of God; and in the depths of hell all the demons fell on their faces and howled aloud to perceive that in spite of all their pains to turn a world or a home into a hell, the Lord God could take one little child and render all their labors vain.

Thus, besides the fairy element in the schoolgirl, there is God’s gift of youth, inexpressible, beautiful, glorious, divine. It is for the young that the rest of us live; it is on their motions that we hang; it is for them that we labor, suffer, and endure; it is for them that we flout the ills of life; it is for them that we are blind to death. Youth, — wonderful youth, — so great a gift to possess, so infinitely greater a gift to perceive in boys and girls about you!

But it is not mere youth that the schoolgirl possesses — she possesses youth in a most wonderful form. No one will say that it is more wonderful than that of the boy passing into manhood; one cannot compare these exceeding glories. ‘Dost thou know the balancings of the clouds, the wondrous works of Him which is perfect in knowledge? ’ She possesses youth in the form of maidenhood, —

and her maiden moonlight steeps the world in beauty and romance. It touches that which in the glare of day is common, cheap, vulgar, or shameful, and blesses it.

We common men, with our trivial thoughts, our petty selfishnesses, our little vulgarities, our ill-concealed meannesses, walk out into this moonlight, and our thoughts, as the great Italian poet says, become ennobled. We, for the time, — and by the grace of God not for the time only, — become worthy to wander about in that moonlight, and dream dreams of beauty, of holiness, of what this world might be.

It is not strange, perhaps, that Wordsworth of all English poets has best described the maiden. Perhaps, because he was no lover, because he had never been swept away by the tyrant passion, he appreciated, so far as mortal may, the true value of the maiden.

And this makes it so odd to see our friends, professors of pedagogy, teachers, trustees of schools, overseers of seminaries, full of good will, of high intentions, bubbling over with purposes and plans to prepare girls for the shopand-drawing-room civilization so dear to us, all hot and agog over the advantages or disadvantages of these traditional exorcising formulæ, all devising new exorcising formulæ, new charms, new spells, wherewith to exorcise the fairy spirit from our American girls and turn girlhood into a systematized, standardized, practicalized, and vitalized institution (I recall their phraseology as best I can), for uprooting the fairy flowers from the weed-beds of life. Heaven bar their way!