seek profit from,
thought she could be made presentable in the first circles if taken in
hand in good season. So it came about that, before many weeks had passed
over her as a scholar in the great educational establishment, she might
be considered as on the whole the most popular girl in the whole bevy
of them. The studious ones admired her for her facility of learning, and
her extraordinary appetite for every form of instruction, and the showy
girls, who were only enduring school as the purgatory that opened into
the celestial world of society, recognized in her a very handsome young
person, who would be like to make a sensation sooner or later.

There were, however, it must be confessed, a few who considered
themselves the thickest of the cream of the school-girls, who submitted
her to a more trying ordeal than any she had yet passed.

"How many horses does your papa keep?" asked Miss Florence Smythe. "We
keep nine, and a pony for Edgar."

Myrtle had to explain that she had no papa, and that they did not keep
any horses. Thereupon Miss Florence Smythe lost her desire to form an
acquaintance, and wrote home to her mother (who was an ex-bonnet-maker)
that the school was getting common, she was afraid,--they were letting
in persons one knew nothing about.

Miss Clare Browne had a similar curiosity about the amount of plate used
in the household from which Myrtle came. Her father had just bought a
complete silver service. Myrtle had to own that they used a good deal of
china at her own home,--old china, which had been a hundred years in the
family, some of it.

"A hundred years old!" exclaimed Miss Clare Browne. "What queer-looking
stuff it must be! Why, everything in our house is just as new and
bright! Papaa had all our pictures painted on purpose for us. Have you
got any handsome pictures in your house?"

"We have a good many portraits of members of the family," she said,
"some of them older than the china."

"How very very odd! What do the dear old things look like?"

"One was a great beauty in her time."

"How jolly!"

"Another was a young woman who was put to death for her
religion,--burned to ashes at the stake in Queen Mary's time."

"How very very wicked! It was n't nice a bit, was it? Ain't you telling
me stories? Was that a hundred years ago?--But you 've got some new
pictures and things, have n't you? Who furnished your parlors?"

"My great-grandfather, or his father, I believe."

"Stuff and no