wing, Philippa?"

"Of course he is! Can't you see her eye with fervid fancy rolling?"

"She's burning the midnight oil. That's why her cheeks are so pale!"

"Look here, Phil, a poetess shouldn't eat so much bread-and-butter. You
ought to live on odes and sonnets!"

Though I did not exactly burn the midnight oil, I certainly composed my
poem in bed. I suppose the darkness and the quiet were inspiring, for
all my best ideas came to me when the lights had been turned out, and
only the sound of Lucy's regular breathing broke the silence.

I had tried at first to model my style on Spenser, with very indifferent
success; I fared no better with the heroic couplets of Dryden or Pope;
so, abandoning these ambitious efforts, I finally contented myself with
a humble imitation of the cavalier poets, a period which we had just
been studying in our literature class. I copied it out clearly, and with
many qualms I dropped my contribution into Mrs. Marshall's letter-box.
It was to be a point of honour not to let anyone read the poems
beforehand, so even Cathy did not see my manuscript, nor did she show me
hers, though I divined from her abstracted manner that she, too, had
been engaged in all the agonies of composition.

The much-longed-for day arrived at last. At six o'clock we all assembled
in the large school-room, Mrs. Marshall and the teachers taking their
places on the platform. First came the examination lists. To my delight
I was head of my class in French; Cathy carried all before her in both
ancient and modern history; while Blanche and Janet divided the honours
in geography and mathematics. It was now the turn of the poems, and I
felt little cold shivers of nervousness running down my back as Mrs.
Marshall rose to read out the result of the competition. Would she think
mine very bad, I wondered, and perhaps even cite it as an example of
faulty composition? For one wild moment I devoutly wished I had
consigned it to the flames with the rest of my efforts.

"On the whole," began Mrs. Marshall, "I have had some extremely
satisfactory results from our literary contest, a very fair number of
poems having been received. I regret that some of the contributors do
not seem to have mastered even the elementary rules of metre, and their
verses cannot be made to scan, but the average standard is higher than I
had expected; and I have two here which I think are certainly deserving
of praise, and of such equal merit that I have dec