where they were employed,--good, intelligent, self-respectful women they were, too--who became modest mistresses of thrifty families afterward;--but that is all done with now. Under the present mode of education, nobody is fitted for a low place, and everybody is taught to look for a high one. If we go into a school exhibition, our ears are deafened by declamation addressed to ambition. The boys have sought out from literature every stirring appeal to effort, and every extravagant promise of reward. The compositions of the girls are of the same general tone. We hear of "infinite yearnings," from the lips of girls who do not know enough to make a pudding, and of being polished "after the similitude of a palace" from those who do not comprehend the commonest duties of life. Every thing is on the high-pressure principle. The boys, all of them, have the general idea that every thing that is necessary to become great men is to try for it; and each one supposes it possible for him to become Governor of the State, or President of the Union. The idea of being educated to fill a humble office in life is hardly thought of, and every bumpkin who has a memory sufficient for the words repeats the stanza:-- "Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time." There is a fine ring to this familiar quatrain of Mr. Longfellow, but it is nothing more than a musical cheat. It sounds like truth, but it is a lie. The lives of great men all remind us that they have made their own memory sublime, but they do not assure us at all that we can leave footprints like theirs behind us. If you do not believe it, go to the cemetery yonder. There they lie--ten thousand upturned faces--ten thousand breathless bosoms. There was a time when fire flashed in those vacant orbits, and warm ambitions pulsed in those bosoms. Dreams of fame and power once haunted those hollows skulls. Those little piles of bones that once were feet ran swiftly and determinedly through forty, fifty, sixty, seventy years of life; but where are the prints they left? "He lived--he died--he was buried"--is all that the headstone tells us. We move among the monuments, we see the sculpture, but no voice comes to us to say that the sleepers are remembered for any thing they ever did. Natural affection pays its tribute to its departed object, a generation passes by, the stone grows gray, and the man has ceased to be, and is to the world as if he had never lived. Why is it that no more have left a name behind them? Simply because they were not endowed by their Maker with the power to do it, and because the offices of life are mainly humble, requiring only humble powers for their fulfilment. The cemeteries of one hundred years hence will be like those of to-day. Of all those now in the schools of this country, dreaming of fame, not one in twenty thousand will be heard of then,--not one in twenty thousand