nk down on a chair exhausted and
bewildered. Then she sobbed a little in despair.

"What shall I do with that girl?" she muttered. "I'm beat out."

"Come home, Henrietta," said Periwinkle, and she marched Henrietta out
the door under the very eyes of the schoolmistress.

"Come back this minute!" cried Miss Tucker, rallying when it was too
late. But the weeping Henrietta, the solemn Periwinkle, and the
rejoicing Rob Riley went away and answered the poor woman never a word.

Miss Tucker, who was not without some good sense and good intentions,
found out that evening that she did not like teaching. She forthwith
resigned the school in East Weston. In a week or two a new teacher was
engaged, "a young thing from town," as the people put it, "who never
could manage that Henrietta Newton."

But sometimes even a "young thing" is gifted with that undefined
something that we call tact. Sarah Reade soon found out, from the
gratuitous advice lavished upon her, that her chief trouble would be
from Henrietta; so she took pains to get acquainted with the unruly
girl the first day. Finding that the center of Henrietta's heart was
Periwinkle, she took great interest in getting the girl to tell her all
about Periwinkle. Henrietta was so much softened by this treatment that
for three whole days after the advent of Miss Reade she did not draw a
picture on the slate. But the self-denial was too great. On the fourth
day, while Miss Reade was hearing recitation, and the girls at the desk
behind Henrietta were looking over at her, she drew a cow very
elaborately.

She was just trying to make the horns look right, rubbing them out and
retouching them, while the other girls rose up in their seats and
brought their heads together in a cluster to see, declaring in a
whisper that "it was the wonderfullest thing how Henrietta could draw,"
when who should look down among them but Miss Reade herself. As soon as
Henrietta became conscious of Miss Reade's attention she dropped her
pencil, not with the old defiant feeling, but with a melancholy sense
of having lost standing with one whose good opinion she would fain have
retained.

The teacher took the slate in her hand, not in Miss Tucker's energetic
fashion, but with a polite "Excuse me," which made Henrietta's heart
sink down within her. For half a minute Miss Reade scrutinized the
drawing without saying a word.

"Did anybody ever give you any drawing lessons?" she said to the
detected crimi