it. It is awfully interesting to notice the difference
between the first report and the last one, because somehow each person
cannot help adding a little or leaving out a little in passing it on to
the next. That is the way slander grows, you know. The gossip may be true
at first, or almost true, but it keeps changing and getting worse and
worse and more thrilling as it spreads till finally it isn't hardly true
at all. That is how our classes in manners turned out.

Well, to go back to that day in the rhetoric section. Miss Anglin saw
that we were discouraged before we had commenced and we didn't know how
to start; and so she began to suggest subjects. For instance, she said,
one girl might wake up in the morning----Oh, but I am forgetting her
application of the illustration from the game of Slander. She said that
if no two persons receive the same impression from a whispered story
spoken in definite words, it is probable that no two pairs of eyes see
the same thing in the same way, to say nothing of the ideas aroused in
the different brains behind the eyes. One girl might wake up in the
morning, as I was saying, and when she looks from the window she sees
snow everywhere--provided it did snow during the night, you understand.
Then she writes her daily theme about the beautiful whiteness, the
shadows of bare trees, diamond sparkles everywhere and so forth. Another
girl looks out of that very same window at the same time, and she doesn't
think of the beautiful snow merely as snow; she thinks of coasting or
going for a sleigh-ride or something like that. And so her theme very
likely will prove to be a description of a coasting carnival or
tobogganing which she once enjoyed. Another girl looks out and thinks
first thing, "Oh, now the skating is spoiled!" Her theme maybe will tell
how she learned to skate by pushing a chair ahead of her on the ice.

Berta raised her hand again. "Well, but, Miss Anglin," she said, "suppose
it doesn't snow?"

Berta is not really stupid, you know, quite the reverse indeed, but she
is used to having the girls laugh at what she says. They laughed this
time, and Miss Anglin did too, because she knew Berta was just drawing
her out, so to speak. She went on to give other examples about the things
we see while out walking or shopping or at a concert, and finally she
drifted around to character-reading. She said a street-car was a splendid
field for that. The next time one of us rode into town, she