Mrs. Bass, the meek widow of a Methodist clergyman, succeeded the eighteen-year-old girl in the conduct of the neighborhood school. It is doubtful if we learned anything worth relating from her. I am sure we learned nothing evil. She was very kind, very gentle, very devout; she wore a widow’s cap and a bombazine gown, and she was the only woman I ever heard pray until I was over fourteen years of age. There were a dozen girls in the class, which met in a one-roomed building in a lot adjoining her garden. We had no public schools at that date in Virginia. We were all paid pupils, and carefully selected from families in our own class. Those from Presbyterian families outnumbered the rest, but no objection was made by our parents to the “methods” of the Wesleyan relict. The tenets of the two churches were the same in the main. Discrepancies in the matter of free agency, predestination, and falling from grace were adjudged of minor importance in the present case. Mrs. Bass was not likely to trench upon them in the tuition of pupils of tender age. I more than suspect that there would have been a strong objection made to intrusting us to a Baptist, who would not lose an opportunity of inculcating the heresy that “baptize” meant, always and everywhere in the Bible, immersion. And every school was opened daily by Bible-reading. To this our black-robed, sweet-faced instructress joined audible petitions, and in our reading and the lessons that followed she let slip no chance of working in moral and religious precepts. Let one example suffice: One of our recitations was spelling, with the definitions, from Walker’s Dictionary. Betty Mosby, a pretty girl with a worldly father and a compliant mother, had learned to dance, and had actually attended a kind of “Hunt Ball,” given in the vicinity by her father’s sister. She had descanted volubly upon the festivities to us in “play-times,” describing her dress and the number of dances in which she figured with “grown-up gentlemen,” and the hearts of her listeners burned within us as we listened and longed. On this day the word “heaven” fell to me to spell and define. This done, the “improvement” came in Mrs. Bass’s best class-meeting tone: “Heaven! I hope and pray you may get there, Virginia! You ought not to fail of the abundant entrance, for your parents are devout Christians and set you a good example, but from him to whom much is given shall much be required. Next! ‘Heavenly!’” Near the foot of the column stood “Hell.” Anne Carus rendered it with modest confidence, spelling and defining in a subdued tone befitting the direful monosyllable. That she was a minister’s daughter was felt by us all to lend her a purchase in handling the theme. Mrs. Bass was not to be cheated of her “application”: “HELL!” she iterated in accents that conveyed the idea of recoiling from an abyss. “Ah-h-h! I wonder which of my little scholars will lie down in everlasting burnings?”