"We gave ye a whole ha'penny worth o' chocolate caramels," said Janet. Her head rested on my knee and she smiled up in my face. "Ye were far ower easy wi' us," she said seriously, "we never did half the lessons ye gave us to do." "I know, Jan, but I didn't particularly want you to do lessons; all I wanted was that you should be Janet Brown and no one else. I wanted you to be a good kind lassie ... and of course, as you know, I failed." And she pulled my nose at this. "I didn't like the school when I was there," said Margaret; "I never was so glad in my life as when I was fourteen." "Poor Margaret," I said, "your schooling should be the pleasantest memory of your life. What you learned from books doesn't matter at all; what matters is what you were. And it seems that memory will bring to you a picture of an unhappy Margaret longing to leave school. What a tragedy!" "Is being happy the best thing in life?" asked Margaret. "Not the best," I answered; "the best thing in life is making other people happy ... and that's what the books mean by 'service.'" * * * Margaret came over to my bothy to-night to ask if I would help Nancy with her home lessons. "She's crying like anything," said Margaret. I went over to the farmhouse. Nancy sat at the kitchen table with her books spread out before her. She was wiping her eyes and looked like beginning to weep again. "It's her pottery," explained Frank, "she canna get it up at all." Macdonald had ordered the class to learn the first six verses of Gray's _Elegy_, and threatened dire penalties if each scholar wasn't word perfect. "I'm afraid I can't help you much, Nancy," I said. "You'll just have to set your teeth and get it up. Don't repeat it line by line; read the six verses over, then read them again, then again. Read them twenty times, then shut the book and imagine the page is before you, and see how much of the stuff you can say." I used to find this method very effectual when I got up long recitations in my younger days.