d no patience with the ordinary
aimless routine of a girl's school course, and in the case of his
daughters had carefully provided for their different abilities and
tastes. Esther was a born student, a clear-headed, hard-thinking girl,
who took a delight in wrestling with Latin verbs and in solving problems
in Euclid, while she had little or no artistic faculty. He put her
through much the same course as his own boys, gave her half an hour's
private lesson on unoccupied afternoons, and cut down the two hours'
practising on the piano to a bare thirty minutes. Esther had pleaded to
give up music altogether, on the ground that she had neither love nor
skill for this accomplishment, but to this the vicar would not agree.

"You have already spent much time over it, and have passed the worst of
the drudgery; it would be folly to lose all you have learnt," he said.
"You may not wish to perform in public, but there are many other ways in
which your music may be useful. In time to come you would be sorry if
you could not read an accompaniment to a song, play bright airs to amuse
children, or hymn tunes to help in a service. Half an hour a day will
keep up what you have learned, and so much time you must manage to
spare."

With Mellicent the case was almost exactly opposite. It was a waste of
time trying to teach her mathematics, she had not sufficient brain power
to grasp them, and if she succeeded in learning a proposition by heart
like a parrot, it was only to collapse into helpless tears and
protestations when the letters were altered, and, as it seemed to her,
the whole argument changed thereby.

Fraulein protested that it was impossible to teach Mellicent to reason;
but the vicar was loath to give up his pet theory that girls should
receive the same hard mental training as their brothers. He declared
that if the girl were weak in this direction, it was all the more
necessary that she should be trained, and volunteered to take her in
hand for half an hour daily, to see what could be done. Fraulein
accepted this offer with a chuckle of satisfaction, and the vicar went
on with the lessons several weeks, patiently plodding over the same
ground without making the least impression on poor Mellicent's brain,
until there came one happy never-to-be-forgotten morning when Algebra
and Euclid went spinning up to the ceiling, and he jumped from the table
with a roar of helpless laughter.

"Oh, baby! baby! this is past all be