mistress. Whereupon I arranged my dolls in various classes, instructing them not only in the scanty knowledge I had myself attained, but boldly exhorting and lecturing them on the higher moral duties.
According to their imagined progress or obedience, they were elevated from shelf to shelf in the baby-house, which, being a capacious beaufet of carved oak, with many compartments, was favorable to this gradation of discipline. Afterwards, when I became, at the age of four, a member of school, I observed as a sort of adept the modus operandi; while these incipient criticisms, with the previous doll-practice, were not without their use when, in due time, the ruling hope reached fruition.
In the early bloom of youth, surrounded by the attractions of life's gayest period, interested in its innocent pleasures, and happy with loving and loved associates, the desire of teaching remained inherent and unimpaired. It was not sustained by sympathy, for I cherished it in secret; nor by example, as my young friends had no such ambition, and, had they discovered mine, might have regarded it with surprise or ridicule. Yet there it dwelt, as the germ that the snows cover, biding its time.
I did not fully communicate it even to my parents, for I thought it might strike them as arrogance. Yet my mother, who with a kind of second sight had always read my heart, knew its unuttered yearning.
