laugh, every note of which said as plainly as words could,--

"'I've caught you now, old lady. How is the pain? Did the medicine
help you?'

"I tell you, girls, it was the hardest pain I ever had in my life, and
I never want another."

"Tell us how the medicine tasted," said Lilly White.

"Tasted! why, like rhubarb, castor oil, assafoetida, ginger, mustard,
epicac, boneset, paregoric, quinine, arsenic, rough on rats, and every
other hideous medicine in the pharmacopoeia."

"Good enough for you; you oughtn't to have lied," said Martha Dodd,
her missionary blood telling for the moment.

But the other girls only laughed; the joke on Lucy was a foretaste of
the fun which this club was to inaugurate.

Now, if Miss Palmer did not report to Miss Ashton, and she break up
the whole thing, how splendid it would be!

Undaunted, as after a week nothing had been said to them in the way of
disapproval, they went on to choose the other members of the club; to
appoint times and places for meeting; and to organize in as methodic
and high-sounding a manner as their limited experience would allow.

CHAPTER IX.

MISS ASHTON'S ADVICE.

That the formation of such an insignificant thing as this Demosthenic
Club should have affected girls like Dorothy Ottley and Marion Parke
would have seemed impossible; but it was destined to in ways and times
that were beyond their control. When the club was making its selection
of members, among those most sought were Marion and Dorothy. Marion,
with her cheery, social Western manners, made her way rapidly into one
of those favoritisms which are so common in girls' boarding-schools.
She always had a pleasant word for every one, and always was ready to
do a kind, generous act. She was so pretty, too, and dressed so simply
and neatly, that there was nothing to find fault with, even if the
girls had not been, as girls are, in truth, as a class, generous,
noble, on the alert to see what is good, rather than what is
otherwise, in those with whom they live. As for Dorothy, she was the
model girl of the school. The teachers trusted and loved her, so did
the pupils. No one among them all said how the sea had browned and
almost roughened her plain face; how hard work, anxiety, and poor
fare had stunted her growth; how carrying the cross children, too big
and too heavy, had given a stoop to her delicate shoulders, and knots
on her hands, that told too plainly of burdens they were unable to
lift