air of Miss Marlett's
shuddering establishment, and by the frosty light of a single candle.
This young lady was tall and firmly fashioned; a nut-brown maid, with
a ruddy glow on her cheeks, with glossy hair rolled up in a big tight
knot, and with a smile (which knew when it was well off) always faithful
to her lips. These features, it is superfluous to say in speaking of a
heroine, "were rather too large for regular beauty." She was perfectly
ready to face the enemy (in which light she humorously regarded her
mistress) when the loud cracked bell jangled at seven o'clock exactly,
and the drowsy girls came trooping from the dormitories down into the
wintry class-rooms.

Arithmetical diversions, in a cold chamber, were the intellectual treat
which awaited Margaret and her companions. Arithmetic and slates! Does
anyone remember--can anyone forget--how horribly distasteful a slate
can be when the icy fingers of youth have to clasp that cold educational
formation (Silurian, I believe), and to fumble with the greasy
slate-pencil? With her Colenso in her lap, Margaret Shields grappled for
some time with the mysteries of Tare and Tret. "Tare an' 'ouns, _I_ call
it," whispered Janey Harman, who had taken, in the holidays, a "course"
of Lever's Irish novels. Margaret did not make very satisfactory
progress with her commercial calculations. After hopelessly befogging
herself, she turned to that portion of Colenso's engaging work which is
most palpitating with actuality:

"If ten Surrey laborers, in mowing a field of forty acres, drink
twenty-three quarts of beer, how much cider will thirteen Devonshire
laborers consume in building a stone wall of thirteen roods four poles
in length, and four feet six in height?"

This problem, also, proved too severe for Margaret's mathematical
endowments, and (it is extraordinary how childish the very greatest
girls can be) she was playing at "oughts and crosses" with Janey Harman
when the arithmetic master came round. He sat down, not unwillingly,
beside Miss Shields, erased, without comment, the sportive diagrams, and
set himself vigorously to elucidate (by "the low cunning of algebra")
the difficult sum from Colenso.

"You see, it is like _this_," he said, mumbling rapidly, and scribbling
a series of figures and letters which the pupil was expected to follow
with intelligent interest. But the rapidity of the processes quite dazed
Margaret: a result not unusual when the teacher understands h