So, just as the stage-horn was blowing, at half past eight one bright June morning, Mary put into the dinner basket an extra saucer pie, sweetened with molasses, and walked the little one off to school. What school was Patty had no idea. She had heard a great deal about the new "mistress," and wondered what sort of a creature she could be. She soon found out. Miss Judkins was merely a fine-looking young lady, with a tortoise-shell comb in her hair, not quite as large as a small chaise-top. She looked like other people, and Patty was sadly disappointed. There was an hour-glass on the desk full of dripping sand, and Patty wanted to shake it to make the sand go out faster, for she grew very tired of sitting still so long hearing the children read, "Pretty cow, go there and dine." She was afraid to say her letters; but after she had said them, was much prouder than the Speaker of the Senate after he has made a very eloquent speech. She had nothing more to do, and watched the little girls working their samplers. Her sister Mary, not yet eight years old, was making a beautiful one, with a flower-pot in one corner and a tree and birds in the other, and some lines in the middle like these:-- "EDUCATION. "Be this Miss Mary's care: Let this her thoughts engage; Be this the business of her youth, The comfort of her age." Patty looked on, and watched Mary's needle going in and out, making little red crooks. She did not know the silk letters, and would not have understood the verse if she had heard it read; but neither did the big sister understand it herself. "Be _this_ the business of her youth," Mary thought meant the _sampler_, for really that sampler _had_ been the business of her youth ever since she had learned to hold a needle, and the tree wasn't done yet, and the flowers were flying out of the flower-pot on account of having no stems to stand on. Patty was ashamed because she herself had no canvass with silk pictures on it to carry out to the "mistress." The more she thought about it, the more restless she grew, till before noon she fell to crying, and said aloud,-- "_I_ want to work a _sambler_; yes, I do." Miss Judkins told Mary she had better take her home. Patty felt disgraced, and cried all the way, she did not really know what for. Sometimes she thought it was because the school was such a poor place to go to, and then again she thought it was because she wanted to work a "sambler." When they got home she did not wait till they were fairly in the house, but called out, with a loud voice,-- "O, mamma! She's only a woman! The mistress is only a woman!" That was all the way she had of telling how cruelly disappointed she felt in the school.