On this day we had a chapter in Kings—First or Second—in which occurred a verse my father would have skipped quietly at our family worship. Sarah L. was the biggest girl in the class—in her sixteenth year, and quite grown up. She dexterously slipped past the bit of Bible history, taking the next verse, as if by accident. “Go back and read your verse!” thundered the young theologue. “I will have no false modesty in my school.” My cheeks flamed as redly with anger as Sarah’s had with maiden shame, as I followed suit with the next passage. I resented the coarse insult to a decent girl, and the manner thereof. I was faint with the pain of the wounded finger, and altogether so unnerved that my voice shook and fell below the pitch at which we were taught to read aloud. Out barked the bulldog again over the top of the open Bible he held: “What ails Miss High-and-Mighty to-day? In one of your tantrums, I see. Read that verse again, and loud enough to be heard by somebody besides your charming self!” Where—will be asked by the twentieth-century reader—was parental affection all this while? How could a fearless gentleman like your father submit for an hour to the maltreatment of his young daughter and the daughters of friends who confided in his choice of a tutor? My answer is direct. We never reported the worst of our wrongs to our parents. To “tell tales out of school” in that generation was an offence the enormity of which I cannot make the modern student comprehend. It was a flagrant misdemeanor, condemned by tradition, by parental admonition, and by a code of honor accepted by us all. I have known pupils to be expelled for daring to report at home the secrets of what was a prison-house for three-fourths of every working-day. And—strangest of all—their mates thenceforward shunned the tale-tellers as sinners against scholastic and social laws. “If you get a flogging at school, you will get another at home!” was a stock threat that set the seal of silence upon the culprit’s lips. To carry home the tale of unjust punishment meted out to a school-fellow would be a gross breach of honorable usage. The whole system smacked of inquisitorial methods, and gave the reactionary impetus to the pendulum in the matter of family discipline and school jurisdiction which helped on the coming of the Children’s Age in which we now live. The despotism of that direful period, full of portents and pain, may have taught me fortitude. It awoke me to the possibilities of evil hitherto undreamed of in my sunny life. I have lain awake late into the night, again and again, smarting in the review of the day’s injuries, and dreading what the morrow might bring of malicious injustice and overt insult, and cudgelling my hot brain to devise some method of revenge upon my tormentor. Childish schemes, all of them, but the noxious seed was one with that which ripens into murder in the first degree.