_She_ was nothing to the town. She hired her seat, and went to church. She had no vote, was never on a parish committee, had only one chance to change her position. That was to remove to a more congenial neighborhood, at a lower salary; but she thought of her young sister, and refused. If the committee heard of it, they did not offer to increase her salary. They were men incapable of appreciating her rare and modest culture. There was a tendency to consumption in her frame. Had she been happy, she might have resisted it for years, perhaps for ever; but with the restless pining at her heart, that mental and moral marasmus, the physical disease soon showed itself. In the commencement of the third year of her teaching, she began to cough; and, in less than three months from the day when she heard her last class, she lay in an early but not unhonored grave. The deep affection of her classmates in the Normal School had always followed her; and one who chanced to hear of her illness brightened its rapid decline. This woman, herself prematurely old, in consequence of twelve years of labor on the Red River of Louisiana, the only place open to her, where her abilities were appreciated to the extent of twelve hundred dollars a year, and would enable her to support a widowed mother,--this woman, with her now-scanty purse, supplied the invalid with fresh flowers and sweet pictures; and, when her heavy eye grew weary of gazing, gently closed it in the sleep of death, scattered rare and fragrant blossoms over her unconscious form, and followed it to the grave. Those flowers! brought daily to her teacher's-desk by a friendly or loving hand, they might have fed a craving heart, and saved a precious life.