HEALTH AND EDUCATION.

THE Misses Thompson, whose select
establishment for young ladies occupies a trim
suburban villa, its garden separated by lance-
headed railings from the turmoil of the
world, and its windows screened by green
jalousies from the glances of eyes masculine,
—whose system is supported by numerous
testimonials from parents and the clergy (the
last named body being of course inspired by
a divine afflatus on all educational matters),
and whose study it is to combine the discipline
of a school with the comforts, elegances, and
affections of a home,—the Misses Thompson
will exclaim to one another, Health and
Education! What unconnected subjects.

Taken separately, however, the words are
familiar to these ladies. They believe
devoutly that education has been, and still is,
the business of their lives; and they know
that health is a blessing of which they have
long despaired. Miss Thompson, especially,
is a sad dyspeptic; and it is well for her
pupils if heightened rubicundity of nose, or
increased sallowness of skin, gives timely
warning of unusual gastric irritation. Dear
Mr. Pestle often assures her that the heavy
responsibilities of her anxious and arduous
position are the sole causes of her
ailments, causes beyond even his skill to
remove; and that she must resign herself to
a palliative treatment guided by his perfect
knowledge of her constitution—to an
occasional blue pill, and to a subsequent course of
stomachic draughts. Dear Mr. Pestle also
keeps his eye upon the dear girls, supplying
steel mixtures to Miss Fanny, throwing in
quinine to Miss Louisa, and suggesting cod-
liver oil for Miss Jane. Little Annette, the
East Indian, is well known to be a delicate
plant; and for her Mr. Pestle recommends
mutton chop dinners, and a luncheon at eleven,
consisting of three-fourths of the yolk of a large
egg beaten up with two-thirds of a small
wine-glassful of sherry, and accompanied by
three strips of stale bread, toasted upon one
side. Mr. Pestle does not say that the dear
girls sleep, work, and play in crowded and
ill-ventilated rooms; that their exercise is
bad in kind and insufficient in amount; or
that the mental work exacted from them,
although seldom conducive to real intellectual
growth, is often more than a growing brain can
perform with safety. He knows perfectly
that on all these subjects his clients will
follow their own devices; he knows that any
uncalled-for and hyper-conscientious
interference might transfer the school to the
visiting list of some less scrupulous neighbour;
and he perhaps reflects, being human, that
too much health in the world will not
conduce to the prosperity of doctors. If his
best patients choose so to act that they
require his services, why should he, who is not
consulted until after the mischief is done,
stand obstinately in his own light?

Mr. Pestle is a shrewd and capable man;
and a conviction springing from his earliest
professional experience has grown and
strengthened with his grey hairs. He has
found that patients consider truth to be of all
pills the least palatable, and the one that
requires the thickest gilding. He has therefore
formed a habit of obtaining obedience
from the sick, and from those around them,
by couching his precepts in a form that shall
harmonise with their prejudices. A little
tact, a little management, a ready assent to
some monstrous proposition, has often saved
him a world of trouble, and has enabled him
to escape the silly questions of a captious
valetudinarian. But, if we can separate his
medical from his worldly knowledge, and
render him temporarily forgetful of the
necessity of pleasing Miss Thompson—if we
can persuade him to produce for our benefit
the results of his observations, we shall find
him possessing a profound conviction that
that lady's establishment needs reformation
in many important particulars. He will say
that—not to mention sins against knowledge
committed for the sake of cheapness—Miss
Thompson and her assistants do not discriminate
between teaching and education; or,
if they discriminate, elect the former as their
idol, and pay adoration to the calf they have
set up. Uninformed, not only of the philosophy,
but of the very mechanism of the
mind, they neither know how to guide its
growth or to control its operations. The
ardent religious emotions of the young are
regulated and directed by questions upon the
generations of Abraham, or the longevity of
the patriarchs; the intellect is set to thrive
upon French and German verbs ; and the