A slender girl, very plainly dressed, stepped out first--a girl with grave dark eyes and a firm mouth, which yet trembled a little as she answered her companion's greeting. "Faithful! my Faithful! you are coming home with me after all?" "No, dear; I am going home to my Eunice. I thought I had better." "Have you heard again? Is she not well?" "I have not heard again; but she is not very well, I am afraid. I must go and see." "But you will come back again? You will never, never think of not coming back!" "Oh, yes, I hope so! I think so--unless she is really sick." "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." "With a view to making learned ladies of them all?"