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LOCKE AMSDEN,

OR

THE SCHOOLMASTER:

A TALE.

BY THE AUTHOR OF "MAY MARTIN,"
“THE GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS," &c.

"In every scene some moral let us teach;

And, if we can, at once both please and preach."

POPE'S EPISTLES.

BOSTON:

SANBORN, CARTER & BAZIN.

PORTLAND:

BLAKE & CARTER.

HARVARD COLLEGE

SEP 22 1916

LIBRARY

Hall fund

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1847,

BY D. P. THOMPSON,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY 8. N. DICKINSON, BOSTON,

TO THE

FRIENDS OF POPULAR EDUCATION

AND SELF-INTELLECTUAL CULTURE,

IN THE UNITED STATES,

THE FOLLOWING PAGES,

WRITTEN LESS WITH THE HOPE OF GAINING LITERARY FAME, THAN OF AWAKENING AN INTEREST, AND IMPARTING USEFUL HINTS

ON AN IMPORTANT, AND, WITH ALL OUR BOASTS, A

STILL SADLY NEGLECTED SUBJECT,

ARE RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED

BY

THE AUTHOR.

THE SCHOOLMASTER.

CHAPTER I.

"To me more dear, congenial to my heart,
One native charm than all the gloss of art."
GOLDSMITH.

OUR story, contrary perhaps to fashionable precedent, opens at a common farm-house, situated on one of the prin cipal roads leading through the interior of the northerly portion of the Union. It was near the middle of the day, in that part of the spring season when the rough and chill features of winter are becoming so equally blended with the soft and mild ones of summer upon the face of nature, that we feel at loss in deciding whether the characteristics of the one or the other most prevail. The hills were mostly bare, but their appearance was not that of summer; and the tempted eye turned away unsatisfied from the cheerless prospect which their dreary and frost-blackened sides presented. The levels, on the other hand, were still covered with snow; and yet their aspect was not that of winter. Clumps of willows, scattered along the hedges, or around the waste-places of the meadows, were white with the starting buds or blossoms of spring. The old white mantle of the frost-king was also becoming sadly dingy and tattered. Each stump and stone was enclosed by a widening circle of bare ground; while the tops of the furrows, peering through the dissolving snows, were

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