"... Miss ---- is a bigot, but a very sincere one. She is the most
conservative person I ever met. I think her a very good woman, a woman
of great energy.... She is very kind to me, but had we lived in the
colonial days of Massachusetts, and had she been a power, she would have
burned me at the stake for heresy!
"Yesterday the rush began. Miss Lyman [the lady principal] had set the
twenty teachers all around in different places, and I was put into the
parlor to talk to 'anxious mothers.'
"Miss Lyman had a hoarse cold, but she received about two hundred
students, and had all their rooms assigned to them.
"While she had one anxious mamma, I took two or three, and kept them
waiting until she could attend to them. Several teachers were with me. I
made a rush at the visitors as they entered, and sometimes I was asked
if I were lady principal, and sometimes if I were the matron. This
morning Miss Lyman's voice was gone. She must have seen five hundred
people yesterday.
"Among others there was one Miss Mitchell, and, of course, that anxious
mother put that girl under my special care, and she is very bright. Then
there were two who were sent with letters to me, and several others
whose mothers took to me because they were frightened by Miss Lyman's
_style_.
"One lady, who seemed to be a bright woman, got me by the button and
held me a long time--she wanted this, that, and the other impracticable
thing for the girl, and told me how honest her daughter was; then with a
flood of tears she said, 'But she is not a Christian.
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