THE AGASSIZ SCHOOL 53 
uncertain when I saw him last whether to make a song 
of it or adhere to his original plan of a quartette. 
Longfellow says he has written himself out on the 
subject. with the first effort and his music will not 
come again at his call; so we must do with those 
words or none at all. 
Did Dresel ever give you a song of Schumann’s, 
the words being the instructions of the Scotch widow 
of the chief of some Highland Clan teaching her little 
boy how to steal when he should grow up to man- 
hood like his father? It is the oddest song and of a 
decidedly questionable morality. Dresel likes it most 
exceedingly, principles and all. I was afraid he would 
give me the same songs you have, in which case I 
should have been greatly disgusted with my own per- 
formance of them, and had very little satisfaction in 
singing them. But he says the songs that are a little 
too high for you are just about right for me, so that 
I have quite a different set. I enjoy my lessons very 
much though often I find it impossible to practice 
at all between times. 
I wish you would write me a little news of Mrs. 
Gaskell, if you see her. Her life of Jane Eyre [Charlotte 
Bronté] has interested me intensely. I have been liv- 
ing for the last week in that lonely parsonage with 
the populous graveyard before it, and the wild moor 
shut in by hills all around. When you read of Char- 
lotte Bronté’s uneventful life, pressed upon by a 
colorless monotony almost from the beginning to the 
end you understand for the first time what a vol- 
cano must have been pent up in her, that out of such 
