But Mr. Ferrand's great hobby was education. On that theme he delighted to dwell for hours, and to his great work on that subject, he gave so much of his time as was not devoted to superintending family affairs and acquiring useful information—that is, to storing his mind with uninteresting facts and dates, arranged in scientific order. Accurate enumeration, logical deduction, and rigid sequence were the sun and moon of Mr. Ferrand's intellectual system, and he made no account of such wandering and comet-like lights as imagination and the poetic faculty. True, certain poets, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Cowper, and Wordsworth, were to be studied. They were facts in English history, and it was needful, therefore, to have some acquaintance with them. But stories of all kinds—"works of fiction," as he comprehensively classed them—could do nobody any good, and were not to be tolerated for a moment. One of his pet theories was that change of employment was sufficient relaxation; and as his own head and nerves were as hard as cast iron, he never found out the fallacy of his theory. His only son had been a prodigy of learning—only he died at thirteen of a fever which, as Doctor Morton had said at the time, ought not to have killed a baby. Mr. Ferrand loved his son dearly and mourned for him deeply, but neither his grief nor his love prevented him from trying the same system over again with his daughter. Isa was of a different stamp from her brother. Charlie had loved study for its own sake—Isa hated it; Charlie was uncommonly and precociously intelligent—Isa was by no means bright, and was rather young for her age: nevertheless, both must be put through exactly the same process. The system was everything—the individual nothing. Mr. Ferrand had begun by teaching Isa himself, but he had found the confinement too great, and he could not make her study unless he were over her. So he gave up the idea of home education, and sent her to a school whose master was a man after his own heart—a man who revelled on a plenteous diet of "facts and figures," and looked upon Virgil and Homer, Milton, Cowper, and Young, as so much material for parsing. Professor Sampson certainly "got his pupils on" wonderfully fast. The great trouble was that those of them who did not faint by the way—fall sick and have to be taken out of school—left him with an inexpressible disgust for books and information of all sorts. Professor Sampson had done his best with Isa, feeling quite sure that, however tightly he might put on the screws, her father would always be ready to give them another turn. The consequence was that Isa, who under proper treatment might have turned out a very good woman, with a healthy body and a sound mind, was fast becoming morose, feverish, and hysterical, utterly discontented, and ready to consider any change a gain. Moreover, she became sly and deceitful.