thing for such a hideous little girl. I don’t think they ought to be encouraged.” It was plain, therefore, that she thought too much of good looks, and was a stony-hearted monster. “Serves her right,” said primaries, academics and collegiates all with one voice, when Bella Wayne, having for a week daily put the arithmetic class to shame, was banished to Miss MacIver’s room to spend two hours in austere solitude over the lesson of the day. Hildegarde had got special permission to go for ten minutes after school hours to visit Madeleine Smulsky (also a boarder), who was in bed with a violent cold. Coming down-stairs, as Hildegarde passed Miss MacIver’s room she saw the door cautiously open. A spectacled eye gleamed strangely low down in the aperture for one of Miss MacIver’s height, and then the owner of the eye, as if reassured by the look of things outside, opened the door a little wider, and the apparition stood fully revealed. Miss MacIver, many inches shorter than anybody had ever seen her before, and narrowed in proportion, the familiar crochet shawl hanging dowdily over one shoulder, the stiff-held head ornamented with the front of sandy curls, a gouty finger held crookedly up, the effect of cold in the nose faithfully reproduced as the voice twanged out: “Neow young ladies, observe—” It was the arithmetic teacher to the life, only it was Bella Wayne, with her perky little nose supporting huge round spectacles, and her baby mouth pursed in severity repeating the rule, “One or bore of the decibal divisiods of a unid are galled a decibal fragtion.” Hildegarde had stopped, stared, and was seized with uncontrollable giggles. Madeleine Smulsky, hearing these demonstrations, got up out of bed and made all haste to thrust her bare toes through the banisters, and crane a tousled head far enough over the rail to discover what was happening below. Her ecstatic merriment induced Miss Wayne to come further into the hall, and reprove her with a supple young finger stiffly crooked, and speaking not only with a cold in the head, but with that intolerable click in the nose of the sufferer from chronic catarrh— “I would lige yeou do observe there is a sbezial beaudy aboud the laws of bathebadigs—” Again the dreadful noise in the impudent little nose. Madeleine’s attempt to suppress her laughter brought on a fit of coughing, which, with a spasmodic suddenness, choked and died in her throat. For all of a sudden there were three figures in the hall below, and one of them was the real Miss MacIver, saying to herself in miniature: “And now, Miss Wayne, you may take off my shawl, and my skirt, and my glasses.” (Not a syllable about the opulent front.) “And in ten minutes go and report to the principal.” [Illustration: “It was the teacher of arithmetic to the life, only it was Bella Wayne”]