The Principal of the Female College of Montpelier sat in her room--office, call it, or study--her seat of authority, absorbed in business. Her table was littered with papers; the waste-paper basket overflowed with them. There was ink before her, a pen in her hand. Her cap sat crooked on her head; her whitened hair was rumpled. The too active cerebration within had no doubt disturbed the external trimness of her dome of thought, as phrenologists used to tell us that it worked ridges and hollows in the bones of the skull. She was deep in thought. Her grey, intellectual features were tightened in the effort, and her eye roved vacantly in space in search of those choice forms which had long made her style the model of literary expression in Montpelier. She had spent the morning in compounding a syllabus, or a compendium--matters in the manufacture of which she was unrivalled. Now she was considering her address on female self-culture, shortly to be delivered before the Institute of Emancipated Woman, with a list of the hundred books which should form the inseparable companions of every female aspirant to Breadth of View. Her eye wandered to the terrestrial globe at her elbow--a symbol of her learned office, handed down from her predecessors in more simple-minded times; and she reviewed the distinguished literary reputations in remote places and times--the less vulgarly popular or comprehensible, the better for her purpose. Ha! there was the Nile--Egypt--Manetho! A most respectable name Manetho, and not too much said about him. The only difficulty was, were his works extant? She was not sure, and her encyclopædia was too old an edition to make it worth while looking up. Her eye moved eastward: India? _eureka!_ The Rig Veda,--Max Müller and the 'Asiatic Review'! She had read all about it in Littel's 'Living Age,' the pirate's treasure-house. The Rig Veda should head her list. She had not read it, to be sure; but neither had those whom she addressed, and they would not be able to read it, if they were to try--in the original, at least, and she intended to pour scorn upon the use of translations; but it looked well at the head of a list, showed comprehensiveness in the lecturer, and ensured respect from the omniscient critic of the 'Montpelier Review.'