And thus their studies they pursued:--On Sunday, Beef, collects, batter, texts from Dr. Price; Mutton, French, pancakes, grammar--of a Monday; Tuesday--hard dumplings, globes, Chapone’s Advice; Wednesday--fancy-work, rice-milk (no spice); Thursday--pork, dancing, currant-bolsters, reading; Friday--beef, Mr. Butler, and plain rice; Saturday--scraps, short lessons and short feeding, Stocks, back-boards, hash, steel-collars, and good breeding From this repertory of female learning, Came Ellen once a quarter, always fatter! To gratify the eyes of parents yearning. ’Twas evident in bolsters, beef, and batter, Hard dumplings, and rice-milk, she did not smatter, But heartily, as Jenkins says, “demollidge;” But as for any learning, not to flatter, As often happens when girls leave their college, She had done nothing but grow out of knowledge. [Illustration: PRACTICE DRIVES ME MAD.] At Long Division sums she had no chance, And History was quite as bad a balk; Her French it was too small for Petty France, And Priscian suffered in her English talk: Her drawing might be done with cheese or chalk; As for the globes--the use of the terrestrial She knew when she went out to take a walk, Or take a ride; but, touching the celestial, Her knowledge hardly soared above the bestial. Nothing she learned of Juno, Pallas, Mars; Georgium, for what she knew, might stand for Burgo, Sidus, for Master: then, for northern stars, The Bear she fancied did in sable fur go, The Bull was Farmer Giles’s bull, and, ergo, The Ram the same that butted at her brother; As for the Twins, she only guessed that Virgo, From coming after them, must be their mother; The Scales weighed soap, tea, figs, like any other. As ignorant as donkeys in Gallicia, She thought that Saturn, with his Belt, was but A private, may be, in the Kent Militia; That Charles’s Wain would stick in a deep rut, That Venus was a real West-End slut-- Oh, Gods and Goddesses of Greek Theogony! That Berenice’s Hair would curl and cut, That Cassiopëia’s Chair was good Mahogany, Nicely French-polished,--such was her cosmogony! Judge, then, how puzzled by the scientifics Lorenzo’s letter came now to dispense; A lizard, crawling over hieroglyphics, Knows quite as much of their Egyptian sense; A sort of London fog, opaque and dense, Hung over verbs, nouns, genitives, and datives. In vain she pored and pored, with eyes intense; As well is known to oyster-operatives, Mere looking at the shells won’t open natives.