The Little Colonel at Boarding-School by Annie Fellows Johnston

LLOYDSBORO SEMINARY was not an especially attractive place viewed from the outside of the high picket fence, which surrounded its entire domain. The fence itself was forbidding. Its tall pickets, sharp-pointed and close together, seemed to suggest that strict rules were to be found inside; rules like the pickets, too firm and pointed to be easily broken through or climbed over.

The building was old and weather-beaten, but in its prime the school had been one of the best in the State, and many a woman remembered it loyally in after years when she had daughters of her own to educate. So it happened that some of the pupils came long distances, and from many parts of the country, to sit at the same old desks their mothers sat at, to study the same old lessons, and to learn to love every rock and tree on the seminary grounds, because of their associations with all the warm young friendships formed there.