repeat it regularly every morning.

Charlotte returned home in high glee. She at this juncture considered
shorthand as one of the most useful, and decidedly the most
interesting of acquirements; and she continued to exercise herself in
it all the rest of the day. She was exceedingly pleased at being able
already to write two or three words which neither her sister nor even
her father could decipher. For three successive mornings Charlotte
punctually kept her appointment with Mr. Henderson; but on the fourth
she sent a shabby excuse to her kind master; and, if the truth must be
told, he from that time saw no more of his scholar. Now the cause of
this desertion was twofold: first, and principally, her zeal for
shorthand, which for the last eight-and-forty hours had been sensibly
declining in its temperature, was, on the above morning, within half a
degree of freezing point; and, second, a new and far more arduous and
important undertaking had by this time suggested itself to her mind.
Like many young persons of desultory inclinations, Charlotte often
amused herself with writing verses; and it now occurred to her that an
abridged history of England in verse was still a desideratum in
literature. She commenced this task with her usual diligence; but was
somewhat discouraged in the outset by the difficulty of finding a
rhyme to Saxon, whom she indulged the unpatriotic wish that the Danes
had laid a tax on. But, though she got over this obstacle by a new
construction of the line, she found these difficulties occur so
continually that she soon felt a more thorough disgust at this
employment than at the preceding one. So the epic stopped short, some
hundred years before the Norman conquest. Difficulty, which quickens
the ardor of industry, always damps, and generally extinguishes, the
false zeal of caprice and versatility.

Charlotte's next undertaking was, to be sure, a rapid descent from the
last in the scale of dignity. She now thought, that, by working very
hard during the remainder of the time, she should be able to
accomplish a patch-work counterpane, large enough for her own little
tent bed; and the ease of this employment formed a most agreeable
contrast in her mind with the extreme difficulty of the last.
Accordingly, as if commissioned with a search warrant, she ransacked
all her mother's drawers, bags, and bundles in quest of new pieces;
and these spoils proving very insufficient, she set off to tax all her
friend