r this subject, filing into an
amphitheatre of benches about Miss Carmichael, who stood in the centre
of things and wasted no time; she even clipped her words, perhaps that
they might not impede each other in their flow, which lent a
disconcerting curtness of enunciation to an amazing rapidity of the
same. Indeed, Miss Carmichael talked so fast that Emily got but a
blurred impression of her surroundings, carrying away a dazed
consciousness that the contents of certain jars to the right and left of
the lady were amphibian in their nature, and that certain other objects
in skin leering down from dusty shelves were there because of saurian
claims. And because man is a vertebrate, having an internal, jointed,
bony skeleton, man stood in a glass case behind the oracular priestess
of the place, in awful, articulated, bony whole, from which the newly
initiated had constantly to drag their fascinated, shuddering gaze. Not
that Emily wanted to look, indeed she had no time to be looking, needing
it all to keep up with Miss Carmichael, discoursing in unpunctuated,
polysyllablic flow of things batrachian and things reptilian, which,
like the syllables falling from the lips of the wicked daughter in the
story-book, proved later to be toads and lizards.

Miss Carmichael was short and square, and her nose was large. She rubbed
it with her knuckle like a man. She had rubbed it one day as she looked
at Emily, whom she had called upon as "the girl who answers to the name
of MacLauren."

It was not a flattering way to be designated, but freshmen learn to be
grateful for any identity. Then, too, Miss Carmichael was famed for her
wit, and much is to be overlooked in a wit which in another might seem
to be bad manners. Once Emily had been hazy about the word _wit_, but
now she knew. If you understand at once it is not wit; but if, as you
begin to understand, you find you don't, that is apt to be wit. Miss
Carmichael was famed for hers.

Thus called upon, the girl who answered to the name of MacLauren stood
up. The lecture under discussion was concerned with a matter called
perpetuation of type. Under fire of questions it developed that the
pupil in hand was sadly muddled over it.

Under such circumstances, it was a way with Miss Carmichael to play with
the pupil's mystification. "'Be a kitten and cry mew,'" said she, her
eyes snapping with the humour of it. "Why mew and not baa? Why does the
family of cow continue to wear horns?"

Why,