“We are very much in need of a parish-school, Miss Churchill,” said he one evening as he sat with her. “I do not mean by that a free-school, but a school for the instruction of the younger children connected with the congregation. I have conversed with several of my parishioners, and they all favor the plan of establishing one. The circumstances of the surrounding neighborhood point to Heath Hall as its locality, and to the young lady of Heath Hall as its mistress. This has also been named and approved, and I come on the part of the vestry, who will resolve themselves into a board of school trustees, to lay the subject before you for consideration. What do you think of it, Miss Churchill?” “Oh, if I were only fit for it!” “You are the most proper person for it that I know. The faculty of teaching is a natural gift, like painting or poetry, and it is _your_ gift; you can infuse into the mind of a tolerably intelligent child all your own knowledge, and not only so, but if you possess the faculty in its perfection, as I think you do, you can arouse the mind of a dull child, and inspire that of a darkened one with intelligence.” “But I am really _so_ ignorant.” “That is a matter of secondary importance—knowledge can be acquired. You possess the first requisite, that which never _can_ be acquired, the natural adaptation for the profession. Why, Sophie, I have known men of the finest talents and the highest attainments in science and literature, fine classical and mathematical scholars, who could not for the soul of them convey into a child’s mind the reason why you sometimes borrow ten and carry one in the rule of subtraction; and I have known such men at the head of large academies, or filling professors’ chairs in colleges, advanced to their post of responsibility upon account of their vast acquirements in knowledge and their unimpeachable morality. Now this would seem to be all that is required, yet people never take into account the attractions a profession should have for its votary. So these men of unimpeachable morality and unexcelled intelligence pass their time and spend their energies in beating the air, while their pupils are unimproved, except, perhaps, by the instruction of others.” “That is strange,” said Sophie. “You think it is. So a musical genius of acute ear wonders, until he understands how another of no ear can sing out of tune.” “I can certainly teach easily and quickly everything that I know thoroughly, and some things that I do not know thoroughly, for sometimes when trying to explain to little Hagar a subject whose boundaries are indistinct to me, a gleam of light breaks into my mind, and all is clear to my vision—clear to its fullest extent, and my little pupil, at the end of her lesson, knows more than her teacher did at its commencement.”