bed each night at ten
o'clock, as all good children should. The last stanza still rhymes,
thus:

"And so she did not hurry,
Nor sit up late to cram,
Nor have the blues and worry,
But--she failed in her exam."

Mary Brooks took pains that all her "young friends," as she called them,
should hear of this instructive little poem.

"I really thought," said Betty on the first evening of the examination
week, "when that hateful rumor was contradicted, that I should never be
scared again, but I am."

"There's unfortunately nothing rumorous about these exams.," muttered
Katherine wrathfully. "The one I had to-day was the real article, all
right."

"And I have my three worst to-morrow and next day," mourned Betty, "so
I've got permission to sit up after ten to-night. Don't all the rest of
you want to come in here and work? Then some one else can ask Mrs.
Chapin for the other nights."

"But we must all attend strictly to business," said Mary Rich, whereat
Helen Adams looked relieved.

And business was the order of the week. An unwonted stillness reigned
over the Chapin house, broken occasionally by wild outbursts of
hilarity, which meant that some examination or other was over and had
not been so bad after all. Every evening at ten the girls who felt it
necessary to sit up later assembled in one room, comfortably attired in
kimonos--all except Roberta, who had never been seen without her
collar--and armed with formidable piles of books; and presently work
began in earnest. There was really no reason, as Rachel observed, why
they should not stay in their own rooms, if they were going to sit up at
all. This wasn't the campus, where there was a night-watchman to report
lights, and Mrs. Chapin was very accommodating about giving permission.

"This method benefits her gas bill though," said Katherine, "and
therefore keeps her accommodating. Besides, it's much easier to stick to
it in a crowd."

Eleanor never went through the formality of asking Mrs. Chapin's
permission to do anything, and she did not care for the moral support of
numbers. She was never sleepy, she said, pointing significantly to her
brass samovar, and she could work best alone in her own room. She held
aloof, too, from the discussions about the examinations which were the
burden of the week's table-talk, only once in a while volunteering a
suggestion about the possible answer to an obscure or ambiguous
question. Her ideas invariably as