"DO you know, Ted," said Miss Billy, as they took their way to school together one morning in late September, "this air makes me feel like cutting civilisation entirely and taking to the wide prairies, where I can stick feathers in my hair, ride a bare-backed pony, and never hear another dreary platitude of Pope or Dryden's nor bother my head about the difference between the hieroglyphic and the hierotic characters on the Egyptian obelisks." "Well, I wouldn't be surprised at anything you might do," said Theodore, "and I know it would be done exhaustively. But what's the matter with school? I thought you liked it." "Oh, it's not school, altogether. It's everything. It's life,--civilised life,--with all its little petty trials and meannesses. Now here is Miss Peabody's school that we have to pass,--the hall of the select and the home of the cultured,--an Eden from which I have been driven, to judge from the manner of some of the girls when I go by. Of course, I could go round the other way, but I just won't! I march past with my head up and my colours flying,--they give me the iciest bows,--I return them a mere sweep of my eyelashes,--and the thing is over for the day. But it rankles and hurts, and makes me miserable in spite of myself." "I have been enduring that sort of thing for two months," said Theodore. "I am becoming cheerfully resigned to it. Whenever I meet those girls in a crowd together, they have an interesting letter to bend their heads over, or something of that kind, and at the very last moment one or two will look up and give me a half-frightened bow, and I raise my hat with dignity to Miss Peabody's cupola, or some other equally lofty object, and walk on. Of course, I understand Myrtle Blanchard is at the bottom of it all. She's paying back an old score." Miss Peabody's Select Seminary for Young Ladies, which they were approaching, was a handsome building in grey stone, with an imposing iron fence, and a square of well-kept lawn strewn with garden seats, on which "the select" were even now gathered. Miss Myrtle Blanchard was there, and as she saw Miss Billy and Theodore coming, she rose, in company with two other of the most popular girls, and advanced to the gate. "You don't suppose they are meaning to speak to us," gasped Miss Billy in amazement. "Why, those three girls have been the ringleaders of the whole thing!" Evidently the young ladies did mean to speak to them. They advanced with outstretched hands, and Miss Myrtle hooked on to Miss Billy's arm, while the other two engaged Theodore.