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"The Fight at Dame Europa's School" is an 1871 didactic satire written at the end of the Franco-Prussian War by Henry William Pullen, casting European countries as schoolchildren, and portraying their battles as schoolyard skirmishes. Mrs. Europa kept a Dame's School, where Boys were well instructed in modern languages, fortification, and the use of the globes. Her connection and credit were good, for there was no other school where so sound and liberal an education could be obtained. Many of her old pupils held Masterships in other important establishments, two of which may be mentioned as consisting chiefly of dark, swarthy youths, decidedly stupid and backward for their years; while a third was a large modern Academy full of rather cocky fellows, who talked big about the institutions of their school, and talked, for the most part, through their nose.
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Featured November 2009