eness than for verity, or even legibility. They laboriously
taught their pupils to make "hair" lines for upstrokes and heavily
"shaded" ones for down. They decorated their capital letters with
meaningless flourishes, and they did many other things equally useless
and unworthy.

Barbara would have nothing to do with such insincerities. She would not
even try to learn them. She studied the essential form of each letter,
and, discarding everything else, she wrote, as she herself said, "so
that other people might read easily." The result was a dainty little
round-lettered text, which had truth for its basis and uncompromising
sincerity for its inspiration.

Arithmetic gave her a good deal of trouble. Had the mastery of that
science been an "accomplishment," she would have put it aside as one for
which she had no gift, as she had done with music. But she realized that
one must acquire a certain facility in calculation, and she did all the
work necessary to acquire that facility. She puckered her pretty
forehead over the "sums" that she had to do, and she often, all her
life, employed roundabout methods in doing them. But in the end she got
the "answers" right, and that was all that the little truth worshiper
cared for in the case.

She early became fond of reading such books as appealed to her. She
would never consent to believe that she _ought_ to read books that did
not find a response in her mind, merely on the ground that their reading
was deemed a proper part of every young person's education.

"All that sort of thing is 'show off,'" she used to say. "It is a false
pretense;" and she scorned all false pretenses.

Yet she was by no means an idly self-indulgent reader. She diligently
mastered some books that did not particularly interest her, because she
believed them to contain information or instruction or counsel that
might benefit her.

When she was only a dozen years old or so, the little woman took upon
herself the duties of housekeeper in her aunt's mansion, and kept order
there in a way that won something like local fame for herself. It was
not art, or intuition, or rule that inspired her. It was temperament.

Absolute cleanliness was to her a religion, and the servant who fell in
the remotest way short of that was quickly made to think of herself as
an unregenerate sinner. Absolute neatness was another requirement which
the budding little woman insisted upon with relentless persistence. Then
again it seem