after the attack; the forty pupils dwindled to ten, and in April, 1837, the school furniture and apparatus were sold, and the assistant necessarily discharged. The school itself lingered for two years more, until fresh wrath was kindled by the admission of a colored child; there was another withdrawal of pupils, leaving Mr. Alcott with nobody to teach but his own three daughters, the colored child, and one undismayed white pupil. “I earn little or nothing in this miserable school,” he writes in his unpublished diary, April 23, 1839, “nor am I laboring towards any prospective good in it.” During the same month (April 11), in a summary of his small income — for a period not stated — he credits the parents of his pupils with thirty dollars.[1] The school closed finally in June or July, 1839, and left its projector free to adopt his favorite conversational methods of urging his thought, — methods with which he has been identified for forty years. This is not the place to discuss the merits or demerits of his theories of teaching, but the final close of his experiment certainly did him no discredit; he went down with his flag still flying.
The school in which Margaret Fuller was to teach at Providence was the Green Street Academy, founded by Colonel Hiram Fuller, a gentleman in no way her relative. He was a person of some force of character and a good deal of ambition, who perhaps showed both qualities in inviting
- ↑ Alcott’s MS. Diary, vol. xii.
