, as she said, "too much respect for her ankles"
to subject them to so severe a trial, and having also passed that age
when to tumble down in an icy ditch twenty times over in the course of
an afternoon seems the height of mortal bliss.

The hardihood of the vast majority of the girls, the imperturbable good
nature with which they picked themselves up from their recumbent
position and hobbled up the banks on the edge of their skates, spoke
volumes for the success of the system on which they were educated. They
returned to the house glowing and panting, and surged up the staircase--
a stream of buoyant young life which seemed to warm the draughty
corridors and bring sunshine into the colourless rooms. The piles of
"bread and scrape" which disappeared at tea after such an afternoon as
this would have amazed the parents of the daughters whose appetites at
home had been so captious as to excite anxiety in the maternal heart!

"Of course," as the croakers had it, as soon as a week's consecutive
skating had made everyone proficient enough to enjoy the pastime, the
snow descended, and fell in a persistent shower which made the ice
impossibly rough. The girls looked out from their windows on a
wonderful white world, whose beauty was for the time hidden from them by
disappointment, but, in the end, even snow seemed to bring with it its
own peculiar excitements. Relief gangs of pupils were organised to
sweep the principal paths in the grounds, while those not so employed
set to work to manufacture "snow men." Not the ordinary common, or
garden snow man, be it understood--that disreputable, shapeless
individual with his pipe in his mouth, and his hat perched on the back
of his head, with whom we are all familiar--the Hurst Manor girls would
have none of him; but, superintended by the "Modelling Mistress," set to
work with no smaller ambition than to erect a gallery of classic
figures. Some wise virgins chose to manufacture recumbent figures,
which, if a somewhat back-breaking process, was at least free from the
perils which attended the labours of their companions. What could be
more annoying than to have two outstretched arms drop suddenly, at the
very moment when the bystanders were exclaiming with admiration, and to
be obliged to convert a flying god into a Venus de Milo as the only
escape from the difficulty? Or, again, how was it possible to achieve a
classic outline when a nose absolutely refused to adhere to a face