e did not
want to miss the whole of her history class for the sake of examining a
child who was ignorant of all the things that other children knew, but
had picked up the most extraordinary bits of knowledge by herself. So
Babs was left to face the difficulty, for the first time in her life, of
writing something within a given time.

It was certainly not easy to think of anything to say, in this unfamiliar,
austere little room, with a blank sheet of paper staring at her, and
some one preparing to pounce upon her presently, to criticise what she
had done. In the library at home such a chance as this would have
filled her with joy, and the paper would have been covered in a few
minutes with a medley about giants and princesses and dragons, to be told
later on to Kit and Bobbin when they clamoured for a story. But here
it seemed impossible to get a single word on to her sheet of paper, and
she looked at the clock in despair, and wondered what would happen to
her when Miss Finlayson returned and found she had written nothing. She
plunged her pen desperately into the ink at last, and wrote the first
thing that came into her head. It was a title she remembered noticing
on the back of a book with a smart cover--one that had lately been
added to her father's library. She did not know what it meant, and she
was not sure what she was going to say about it, but it sounded more
like the kind of thing to choose for an examination than one of her fairy
stories would have been. Then, just as she had written the heading
very crookedly across the top of the page, she found that the pen she
had picked up was a quill, and possessed the most entrancing capacity
for making splutters. It was the first time she had happened upon a
quill, and the discovery was too delightful to be neglected. So she spent
the next ten minutes in adorning her paper with fantastic ink shapes,
that she named bogies on the spot and wove into a fairy story about an
enchanted princess, who had to write a composition in an hour and a half.
When this exciting occupation began to pall, she was seized with a
sudden desire to explore, and began wandering restlessly round the room.
There was very little to examine besides books; but books were always
good enough for Barbara, and she became very quiet and absorbed as her
inky forefinger travelled slowly along the bottom shelves, until she had
exhausted the outsides of all the volumes that came within her reach.
Then she sto