the news that another name--a
boy's--would be seasonable.

The school immediately went into a committee of the whole. Several names
had been put up, and the discussion was growing heated, when Patty Wyatt
jumped to her feet with the proposal of "Cuthbert St. John." The
suggestion was met with cheers; and Mae Van Arsdale indignantly left the
room. The name was carried by unanimous vote.

Cuthbert St. John Murphy was christened the following Sunday, and
received a gold-lined porridge spoon in a green plush box.

So delighted was the school at Patty's felicitous suggestion, that, by
way of reward, they elected her chairman of the Christmas Carnival
Committee. The Christmas Carnival was a charitable institution
contemporaneous with the founding of the school. St. Ursula's scheme of
education was broad; it involved growth in a wide variety of womanly
virtues, and the greatest of these was charity. Not the modern,
scientific, machine-made charity, but the comfortable, old-fashioned
kind that leaves a pleasant glow of generosity in the heart of the
giver. Every year at Christmastide a tree was decked, a supper laid, and
the poor children of the neighborhood bidden to partake. The poor
children were collected by the school girls, who drove about from house
to house, in bob-sleighs or hay-wagons, according to the snow. The girls
regarded it as the most diverting festival of the school year; and even
the poor children, when they had overcome their first embarrassment,
found it fairly diverting.

The original scheme had been for each girl to have an individual
protege, that she might call upon the family and come into personal
relations with a humbler class. She was to learn the special needs of
her child, and give something really useful, such as stockings or
trousers or flannel petticoats.

It was an admirable scheme on paper, but in actual practice it fell
down. St. Ursula's was situated in an affluent district given over to
the estates of the idle rich, and the proletarian who clung to the
skirts of these estates was amply provided with an opportunity to work.
In the early days, when the school was small, there had been sufficient
poor children to go round; but as St. Ursula's had grown, the poor
seemed to have diminished, until now the school was confronted by an
actual scarcity. But the Murphys, at least, they had always with them.
They yearly offered thanks for this.

Patty accepted her chairmanship and appointed sub