very strong, and at last took hold of her mind altogether. She began to feel that there never was such a hard-worked injured person as Iris Graham, or such a dull, unamusing life as hers. Even the sound of her little sisters' voices as they said the verses they were learning about "the busy bee" provoked her beyond endurance. "I hate bees and I hate being busy!" she said to herself. One warm morning in May she sat, with these thoughts in her mind and a basket of work by her side, in a little room at the back of the house called the "Boys' Room." Her mother was lying down upstairs with a bad nervous headache, and Iris had succeeded with great difficulty in keeping the house quiet for the last hour. The only other person in the room was her brother Max, mumbling over his lessons for the next day half aloud, and presently he threw his book across the table to her. "Just hear me this," he said. Iris propped the book up against her basket and went on darning. "Go on," she said. "Now came still evening on," began Max, with his eyes fixed on the ceiling and his fingers drumming on the table, "and twilight grey had in her sober livery all things clad--all things clad--oh, bother! What's the next?" Iris prompted him, and he halted lamely through his task with many a sigh and groan. "Why couldn't Milton make his things rhyme?" he said impatiently as his sister returned the book. "I never knew such rotten stuff to learn as _Paradise Lost_." "You don't half know it," said Iris. "Oh, mustn't it have been nice to be Adam and Eve!" "Awfully slow," answered Max, making a fancy portrait on the margin of his Milton. "That's just what I should like," said Iris. "I'd rather things were slow. I don't want them all to come huddling together. Fancy the whole long day in a lovely, lovely, garden with no lessons to do, no clothes to mend, and all your time to yourself." "You'd get jolly well tired of it," said Max; "anyhow, I wish old Milton hadn't written all this stuff about it."