"_Is_ our Ada Elizabeth a plain one?" said Mr. Dicki’son, with an air of astonishment which conveyed a genuine desire for information, then turned and scanned the child’s burning face, after which he looked closely at the faces of the other children, so little like hers, and so nearly like that of his pretty, mindless, complaining wife. "Well, yes, little ’un, I suppose you’re not exactly pretty," he admitted unwillingly; "you’re like me, and I never was a beauty to look at. But, there, ’handsome is as handsome does,’ and you’ve brought home first prize to-day, which you wouldn’t have done, may be, if you’d always been on the grin, like Gerty there. Seems to me," he went on reflectively, "that that there first prize ’ll stand by you when folks has got tired of Gerty’s grin, that’s what seems to me. I don’t know," he went on, "that I set so much store by looks. I never was aught but a plain man, but I’ve made you a good husband, Em’ly, and you can’t deny it. You’ll mind that good-looking chap, Joe Webster, that you kept company with before you took up with me? He chucked you up for Eliza Moriarty. Well, I met her this morning, poor soul! with two black eyes and her lips strapped up with plaster. H’m!" with a sniff of self-approval, "seems to me I’d not care to change my plain looks for his handsome ones. ’Handsome is as handsome does’ is _my_ motto; and if I want aught doing for me, it’s our Ada Elizabeth I asks to do it, that’s all _I_ know." The great day of the school treat came and went. The dean’s wife, Lady Margaret Adair, gave away the prizes, as she had promised, and was so struck with "our Ada Elizabeth’s" timid and shrinking air that she kept her for a few minutes, while she told her that she had heard a very good account of her, and that she hoped she would go on and work harder than ever. "For I see," said Lady Margaret, looking at a paper in her hand, "that you are the first in your class for these subjects, and that you have carried off the regular attendance and good-conduct prize as well. I am sure you must be a very good little woman, and be a great favourite with your schoolmistress." Mrs. Dicki’son--who, as the mother of the show pupil of the day, and as a person of much respectability in the neighbourhood, which was not famous for that old-fashioned virtue, had been given a seat as near as possible to the daïs on which Lady Margaret and the table of prizes were accommodated--heard the pleasant words of praise, which would have made most mothers’ hearts throb with exultant pride, with but little of such a feeling; on the contrary, her whole mind was filled with regret that it was not Gerty standing on the edge of the daïs, instead of the unfortunate Ada Elizabeth, who did not show off well. If only it had been Gerty! Gerty would have answered my lady with a pretty blush and smile, and would have dropped her courtesy at the right moment, and would have been a credit to her mother generally.