I never was on an august school committee, but, if I was, I’d make a sine-qua-non that no school-marm should be inaugurated who had not been a married mother; I don’t believe in old maids; they all know very well that they haven’t fulfilled their female destiny, and I wouldn’t have them wreaking their bilious vengeance on my urchins, (if I had any.) No woman gets the acid effectually out of her temper, till she has taken matrimony “the natural way.”

No; I don’t believe in spinster educational teaching any more than I do in putting dried up old bachelors on the school committee. What bowels of mercies have either, I’d like to know, for the poor little restless victims of narrow benches and short recesses? The children are to “hold up their hands” (are they?) if they have a request to make? What good does that do, if the teacher won’t take any notice of the Free Mason sign? “They are not to enter complaints.” So some poor timid little girl must be pinched black and blue by a little Napoleon in jacket and trowsers, till she is forced to shriek out with pain, when she is punished by being kept half an hour after school for “making a disturbance!” They are “not to eat in school,” are they? Perhaps they have made an indifferent breakfast; (perhaps they are poor, and have had none at all, and A, B, C, D, doesn’t digest well on an empty stomach;) but the spinster teacher can hear them recite with a tempting bunch of grapes in her hand, which she leisurely devours before their longing eyes.

They “must not smile in school,” must they? Not when “Tom Hood” in a pinafore, cuts up some sly prank that brings “down the house;” yes—and the ferule too, on everybody’s hand but his own; (for he has a way of drawing on his “deacon face,” to order.)

They may go out in recess, but they must speak in a whisper out doors, as if they all had the bronchitis! No matter if Queen Victoria should ride by, no little brimless hat must go up in the air till “the committee had set on it!”

Oh fudge! I should like to keep school myself. I’d make “rag babies” for the little girls, and “soldier caps” for the boys; and I don’t think I would make a rule that they should not sneeze till school was dismissed; and when their little cheeks began to flush, and their little heads droop wearily on their plump shoulders, I’d hop up and play, “hunt the slipper;” or, if we were in the country, we’d race over the meadow, and catch butterflies, or frogs, or toads, or snakes, or anything on earth except a “school committee.”