My readers are not to suppose that my object is to institute a full comparison between the schools of England and the United States: I have not the wide experience of American schools that would justify me in attempting such a task. For instance, although I have made a careful study of the working methods and interior economy of the common schools of the three American cities in which I have exercised my vocation--namely, Boston, New York and Philadelphia--I have never taught in the public schools; and any survey of the educational facilities of the country that leaves them out would resemble a performance of _Hamlet_ with the role of the prince omitted. Nevertheless, my brief sojourn here has been a chequered and, in some respects, an amusing one; and any one who chooses to hear my record of it may add as much salt as he pleases, for I promise to be perfectly frank in my utterances. I obtained my first pupils by answering a newspaper advertisement--I have already named the three cities which my experience covers--and they consisted of two young ladies, aged respectively eighteen and twenty-two years. Their education had been thoroughly neglected, or, rather, they had idled away the golden chances of their youth, and now their ignorance, for ladies of their social standing, was astonishing. But mark the anomaly: had they been Englishwomen of the same rank and similarly uneducated, they would have been uncouth and ungrammatical in speech, awkward in manner and dowdy in dress. There is no people upon whom the transforming, refining effects of a thorough training are so marked--because, it must be confessed, the native soil so much needs cultivation--as upon the English people. But these girls were ladylike in manner, tastefully dressed, and their speech was entirely free from the barbarisms of an uneducated Englishwoman's language: I hasten to add, however, that I would sooner have the Englishwoman for a pupil. Two Englishwomen who required assistance from a private tutor would submit in patience to a prolonged course of laborious and irksome work, all unmindful of the doings of society and the absorbing interests of the hour, so long as the ultimate object was some day attained. My fair Americans were undoubtedly intelligent, and even spasmodically hard-working, but their impatience of sustained, systematic work, combined with--or rather caused by--their devotion to social pleasures, not one of which they would forego on any consideration, prevented them from reaping any appreciable benefit. I instance their case, not because it was the first or the only one of the kind that fell into my hands, but because it revealed to me at the outset a trait of the American character--especially of the women--which confronted me at every turn of the road afterward; namely, _a want of repose_--a defect which would seem to be largely accountable for the insensibility manifested by a great portion of the American young women of the middle classes to the