lmost
daily progress. Her painting lessons were a source of unmixed pleasure
to her, for hers was a nature that never yielded to discouragement, and
never magnified difficulties.

"You must aim at the Bronze Star this year," her science mistress had
said to her, while helping her to fix the glass slides she was to paint
from, under the microscope, "and next year you must go on to the
Silver----"

"Look, how beautiful the colours are!" Maysie exclaimed in delight. The
delicate, varying tints fascinated her. She set to work with enthusiasm,
never having done anything of the kind before. "'Mycetozoa,' do you call
them?" she asked.

"Yes. Be sure you spell it rightly."

The next day, when the first of her three sheets was finished, Miss
Elton came in to examine it. Though she said little, she was evidently
more than satisfied. It was nearly tea-time, and Maysie spent the few
minutes before preparation was over in tearing up some old drawings.
After breakfast, on the following morning, before the bell rang for
class, she went over to Ruth Allen's desk to ask her how to spell
"Mycetozoa." Ruth was her particular chum, and the best English scholar
in the form.

"I've got something to show you, Maysie," she said, when she had
furnished the desired information. She brought out a piece of paper as
she spoke, and passed it on to her friend behind the cover of her open
desk. It was a fragment of one of Maysie's zoological drawing-sheets,
evidently picked up out of the waste-paper basket--a wasp with wings
outspread, showing the three divisions of an insect's body. The head was
roughly altered so as to form a caricature of a human face, and above
was printed, in letters that might have done credit to Maysie herself:
"Miss E. in a tantrum," and below: "How doth the little waxy wasp
rejoice to snap and snarl!"

Maysie did not share Ruth's unreasonable animosity towards Miss Elton,
but she could not repress a smile at this specimen of school-girl wit.
Just then the bell rang, and she went back to her own desk, while Ruth,
letting the lid of hers slip down, was so startled by the noise it made
in the sudden silence that she did not see a piece of paper flutter out
on to the ground, and gently glide underneath the platform of the
mistress's desk, which was just in front of her.

That morning Maysie began her second sheet, and joined the others in the
garden after dinner. Molly Brooks, another of her friends, came eagerly
runnin