her and not blush; who could see her and not know her offence? These thoughts sank deeply into her consciousness till they became the burden of constant brooding and finally swept her into hysteria and melancholia.

She shut herself away; none could see her. Even her husband was denied her presence. Finally she ensconced herself in a dark room, where she remained for almost six months till she could not endure the slightest ray of light, shrieking with pain if the dark-green shades were lifted even an inch above the window-sill. When the hour arrived for the child's deliverence, the mother's body had so shrunk that the imprisoned baby form could not be released save by a surgical operation. This resulted in the practical slaughter of the infant; while the mother's life was preserved only by a miracle.

All this horror had come upon her because of a false sense of shame, resulting from an extremely false conception of conventional modesty. A few years later, she, freed from the temporary insanity which had dragged her mind into its gloomy depths, resolved once more to lay herself on the altar of motherhood. But now she did so with no false and foolish notion of the immodesty of the pregnant form, but with a consecrated and exalted perception of the glory of pure motherhood. Instead of shutting

herself away in a dark room and brooding on her imagined misery, she courted the sunlight and the fresh air; she subjected her body to rigid and sensible callisthenic practices; she took frequent baths, and scientific exercises in her bed before rising amornings and at night before retiring. She would crawl slowly out of her bed head foremost when arising, and climb up and down a flight of stairs on all fours during the day. She read beautiful and uplifting literature, avoiding everything that was morbid or unduly exciting; she frequented beautiful and romantic landscapes and communed much with Nature.

She lived a free, radiant, hopeful life, warmly and sympathetically assisted by her husband, through the long expectant months. And then the hour came for the veil to be drawn aside and the mysterious sculpture in flesh and blood to be laid upon her panting breast. When she beheld it, with tearful eyes and soft, feeble murmurings of joy, the angels must have hovered round and blessed her, for her happiness was unrestrained.

This child was the fruit of love and common sense; the former child had been the fruit of love vitiated with a perverse sense of false and demeaning modesty.

CHAPTER IX.

The Teacher.

ROBABLY the most responsible and the least seriously appreciated office in life is that of the Teacher. The parents are chiefly responsible for the pre-natal influences cast into the plastic mould of the child in its invisible building, and for the treatment it receives in the formative period of impressionable infancy. But very soon the little bundle of possibilities is thrown off the mother's breast and led away from the fireside and the nursery into the wider world, where reigns the much-dreaded schoolmaster, who is destined to hold so potent a sway over all its remaining youthful years.

The child soon learns to supplant the authority of the parents by that of the school teacher. Somehow, how much soever the instinctive reverence for parents may continue to kindle the breast of the growing infant, once the formidable presence of the

Teacher overshadows its life, the seat of authority is transplanted from the fireside to the desk. The fear of the ferrule is mightier than the dread of the tongue. A mother may scold and punish, but the humiliation is nothing compared to that which follows the scorn of the schoolmaster or the smart of the rattan. Probably more lives have been ruined by incompetent and unwise teachers than by indifferent and foolish parents, though doubtless more noble lives have been moulded in the schoolroom than have been generated in the domestic circle. Chiefly, parents give children to the world; teachers build the children into what they are to become.

Therefore, the ordinary disregard with which the school-ma'am is treated in the amenities of society, her unjust and unhappy classification as an underling and a dependent, is one of the shameful and disgraceful characteristics of our as yet partially unfolded civilization. Underpaid, undervalued, under-honored, and under-estimated, the school teacher is, perhaps in some respects, the most pitiable and painful individual who performs a high office for the benefaction of mankind.

The mass of people have as yet but a diminutive appreciation of what the teacher accomplishes for the race. Once it was supposed that the teacher

had to do with nothing but the child's mind, to train it in a few minor habits of thought, and accustom it to the use of certain formulæ which shall free it from embarrassment in subsequent relations with the world. If a child were but taught the three R's, and how to write a decent English sentence, and speak without too many solecisms of speech, he was supposed to have been made an educated gentleman. But in recent years we have learned that such an estimate of the office of the school teacher is far beneath its legitimate proportions.

There is, in fact, no conceivable relation existing between man and man, no method of thought, no exercise of the imagination, no state of health or use of hygiene, no moment, indeed, of a man's life, from the hour he plunges into the arena of life's battle till his final obsequies, on which in some manner the teacher has not left an indelible impression. His work is not indeed that of the narrow schoolroom, but of the wide world itself. He does not educate minds, he moulds characters. He is not a mere teacher of alphabets, but a maker of languages. Like the artist who works in clay, out of the plastic stuff he pats and kneads and patches the final form of beauty on which his dreams so long have dwelt.