“Oh, she is not so very sick, or you would have heard! What should I ever do without you? Now you must sit with me as far as I go. Here are the cars!”
There was no time to lose. The “cars” had come which were to carry the schoolgirls home for a fortnight’s rest and holiday. From the windows a good many people looked out with interest on the group of girls, and one said to his friend—
“They are from the seminary over the river yonder. We saw it as we came on.”
“Schoolgirls? No; they don’t look like schoolgirls. The greater part of them must be out of their teens, I should say.”
“Possibly, but all the same they are schoolgirls, though there may be a teacher or two among them.”
“Well, friend, after all that you have been telling me about your wonderful common school system, I should have supposed that the education of these sedate young persons might have been finished before the age of twenty.”
“Oh, I have no doubt that these young persons have had the benefit of common school and high school too, before they aspired to a place in the seminary over yonder; and the chances are that some of them since then have earned, either with hands or head, the means to carry them further on; and for these there can be no better place than the plain brick seminary on the other side of the river!”
“Well,” said his friend, “I can only repeat what I have said to you more than once already—you are a curious people in some ways—with your boys who are men, and your prim grave-faced young women who are schoolgirls. I should like to put a question or two to some of them, if I might.”
His friend shook his head.
“You may have a chance to do so before you leave the country, but not to-day, I think. You have no grown-up schoolgirls in Old England? Out of New England I don’t suppose we have so very many even in this country; and there are probably more in the seminary over there than in schools generally among us. It was built by special means for a special purpose. A woman built it—a woman who never owned a dollar that she had not first earned—a great and good woman. She gave herself, body, soul, and spirit, to the work of helping her countrywomen—her sisters, she called them all—who were hungering and thirsting, as she herself in her youth had hungered and thirsted, for knowledge.”