One absurd device that haunted and tempted me for weeks was that I should steal into the tutor’s room some day, when he had gone to ride or walk, and strew chopped horsehair between the sheets. The one obstacle to the successful prosecution of the scheme was that we had no white horses. Ours were dark bay and “blooded chestnut.” No matter how finely I might chop the hairs, which would prick like pins and bite like fleas, the color would make them visible when the sheets were turned down. It was a _crime_!—this initiation of a mere infant into the mysteries of the innate possibilities of evil in human nature. I had learned to _hate_ with all my heart and soul. In all my childish quarrels I had never felt the temptation to lift my hand against a playmate. I understood now that I could smite this tyrant to the earth if I had the power and the opportunity. This lesson I can never forget, or forgive him who taught it to me. It was a new and a soiled page in the book of experience. Despite the continual discouragement that attended the effort to keep my promise to study diligently, I worked hard in school, partly from love of learning, partly to please my parents—chiefly, it must be confessed, because I shrank, as from the cut of a cowhide, from the pitiless ridicule and abuse that followed upon the least lapse from absolute perfection in recitation. Mathematics was never my strong point, and the tutor quickly detected this one of many weak joints in my armor. There was meaning in the grin with which he informed me one day, not long after Christmas, that he had set a test-sum for each of the second class in arithmetic. “If you can do that sum without, any, help, from, anybody,” slowly, the grin widening at each comma, “you may go on with the next chapter in arithmetic. If not, you will be turned back to Simple Division. Of course, _you_ will do yours, if nobody else can work out the answer!” Sneer and taunt stung and burned, as he meant they should. I took the slate from his hand, and carried it to my desk before glancing at it. It was a _horrible_ sum! I knew it would be, and I forthwith made up my mind not to try to do it. He might turn me back to Addition, for all I cared. The worm had turned and stiffened in stubborn protest. At recess I discovered that not another girl of the six in our class had an imposition half so severe as my enemy had set for me. The effect was totally unlike what he had anticipated. My spirit leaped to arms. I would do that sum and keep up with my class—or _die_! I bore the slate off to my room as soon as school was out that afternoon, and wrought mightily upon the task until the supper-bell rang. My work covered both sides of the slate, and after supper I waylaid my sister in the hall and begged her to look at what I had done. She was the crack arithmetician of the school, and I could trust her decision. She sat down upon the stairs—I standing, wretched and suspenseful, beside her—and went patiently over it all.