It is sad to see this young spirit so misunderstanding itself. What Harriet Beecher needed was to run away from those cares for even a short time. Just one little breathing spell, a little freedom from care and responsibility would have freshened her and made it possible for her to carry on her work far more thoroughly, though that perhaps could hardly have been--but at any rate, with as much again of buoyancy and joy. Now she heard little girls recite and told them fairy tales beginning in the immemorial way with “once upon a time” and spinning them out as she went along to the utmost delectation of her young-hearted audience; now she took up the more serious subjects of history and grammar, and the philosophy of taste. After school hours she had to attend the teachers’ meeting, where such subjects as scattering the quill pens and the copy-books on the floor, forming classes, drinking in the entry (drinking water, of course), giving leave to speak, ringing the recess-bell, and such details were solemnly discussed. During this time Dr. Beecher was supplying the pulpit in one of the churches of Cincinnati. On Sundays the pupils in the school went to hear him preach, and on Mondays they were called together to make reports on the sermon. A devotional character was given to the meeting of this class; it was conducted by Harriet and she gave to the service a quiet fervor that was most beautiful and helpful. Very soon a rather important piece of work was put into Harriet’s hands. The school needed a geography for the younger scholars, and Harriet was appointed to make it. She went to work and produced a “New Geography for Children,” which was published in Cincinnati, and was used not only in the Beecher School, but also in all the primary schools of the city. Her geography was not at all like the books of that name that we now use. It belonged with the class of instructive treatises represented by the “Present Condition of the Terraqueous Globe,” written by “Jedediah Morse, D.D.,” which he “Dedicated and Devoted to the Young Gentlemen and Ladies of America with the Most Ardent Wishes for Their Improvement,” and which was reprinted almost every year from 1784 to 1850. The Peter Parley and Malte Brun books belong in the same group. It was the era of a sort of pious compendium written generally in the kindly letters of a father or an uncle. In one number of the _Western Magazine_, a magazine published in Cincinnati during that time, there is a scathing review of several of these small attempts at giving young people some knowledge of the world they lived in. The editor mentions the manual of Peter Parley and that of Malte Brun and complains that these would-be purveyors of natural history take liberties with fact. The anaconda, they informed the children, was so big that it could crush a house; the buffaloes of America were domestic and harmless. “This,” said the editor, “is the way they