There are certain persons whom to meet is like opening the window of a close apartment on a delicious June day. The first breath is an inspiration. You throw back your locks from your heated forehead, and your weary eyes, and ask nothing but to sit down and let this soother minister to you. All your cares, and frets, one by one creep away, and a new life and vigor seem infused into every nerve and muscle. You are not the same creature that you were ten minutes before. You are ready after all to do valiant battle with life, though you had supposed yourself quite surrendered to its everyday, petty, and harassing tyrant necessities. Exuberant animal strength must needs carry with it hopefulness and courage; and they whose nerves have been strained and weakened by past trouble, welcome the breezy, fresh influence of such, like Heaven's own dew and sunshine. It is a tonic, the blessing of which the unconscious giver knows not how to appreciate perhaps, but oh how invaluable to the receiver! A soulful face, an exultant word—a light, springing step! We raise our weary eyes first in wonder, then in admiration; and the sympathetic chord thus struck—the brow clears, the eyes brighten, and life seems—not the curse we morbidly thought it—but the blessing God intended it.
MEN TEACHERS IN GIRLS' SCHOOLS.
I am inclined to think, with all due deference to the powers that be, that male teachers are not best for young girls. It takes a woman, who understands all the witcheries of the sex, and off whom they glance harmless, like water off a turtle's back, to deal with these young kittens; they have more fun than geography can absorb, and are not to be feruled like a great cub of a boy, whose whole future life will be license after jacketdom, as decreed by society and the laws; while a severe woman-discipline surely awaits the most frolicsome girl, beginning from the moment when she first learns what her heart is made of, till death stills its yearnings.
And yet I pity a male teacher of girls, whose studied dignity is in a second dethroned by a single pantomimic gesture of some bright-eyed young flirt, who feels her power without yet being old enough to understand it, and with an instinctive coquetry gets on his blind side, turning all his foreordained frowns into ill-suppressed smiles. How can he box those little round ears? How can he disfigure those soft, white palms? How can he—sending all the other pupils home—trust himself, after school, alone with those bright eyes, to put them through a subduing tear process? Ten to one the "subduing" is on the other side!
Said I to a little girl, not many mornings since, who was getting ready for school, "Why do you put on that bright new dress to go, when your old brown one would do as well?" "Oh," was her reply, "I haven't got my lesson to-day, and of course I must look pretty." There's fourteen-year-old female knowledge of human nature for you! Imagine a boy putting on his best jacket for such a purpose.
There must be discipline, that's certain; but, in my opinion, a man's head must be gray, not brown or black, if he would enforce it; his blood must be cold and sluggish, and his ear deaf to the charmer, charm she never so cunningly, or, certes, his magisterial chair will be set at naught. Don't I know! Answer me, thou now "Reverend" gentleman, who once kept me after school for a reprimand, and spent the precious moments rolling my curls over your fingers, while my comrade was bursting off her hooks and eyes as she peeped through the key-hole. Not that I uphold it, but every animal naturally fights with the weapons a good Providence has given it—and somehow or other I had found that out; though whether France was bounded south by Rhode Island or not was still a mystery that I was not in a hurry to solve.
Still, for all that, I pity a male teacher who is set to the impossible task of making girls "behave." I should pity them more, did I not know that they keep them in school about four or five hours longer than they ought. Did I not know what they know, but will persist practically in ignoring, that the fun has got to come out somehow, or turn to poison in the blood, and that if teachers won't give it whizzing time out of school, they must needs have it fly in their faces in school. I should pity them more, did I not, every day, see their pupils staggering home under a pile of stupidly written school-books, fit only to kindle the kitchen fire—thank goodness their little beaux sometimes save their arms from dislocation, by gallantly carrying them home for them. Do I approve of boy-beaux? Why not? Don't every rosebud draw its humming-bird? Did not God make them both for this harmless, innocent delight? You had your boy-beaux, madam; I had mine, by the score. Only teach your daughter to love you well enough to conceal nothing, however minute, from you; only show her that you have a heart, and don't want her to pluck out her's, and my word for it, no harm will come of her "boy-beaux." It is your repression that does the mischief—your ignoring your own youth and hers. The child who has leave to pluck the apple often leaves it untouched, undesired, on the tree.