"I'm sure I don't know what I've learnt this half-year," said Ruth to herself. "I can't remember learning a single thing which I didn't know six months ago; and yet mother says that I must not leave school until I am fifteen. I wonder what books they use in large boarding-schools, and if they ever get beyond Mangnall's Questions in the first class. I suppose I shouldn't trouble about it if it were not for father's teaching us in the winter evenings; but he knows so much, that we see how ignorant we are." "I didn't know that you were at home, Ruth. How long have you been here?" asked her mother's voice. "Only a few minutes." "Where is your prize? And why did you not show it to me?" [Illustration] "Here it is, mother; but I don't much care for it. There is so little credit in getting a prize at Miss Green's, where one makes so little progress, and has to do the same thing over and over again." "Yes," said Mrs. Arnold with a little sigh, "and so you will find it in life, dear, the same thing over and over again, every day and every year. But now," she added smiling, "as everyone is busy in the hay-field, and baby has to be nursed and the cows to be milked every day, will you help me to do one thing or the other?" "Yes," said Ruth as she went to put on a large blue pinafore; "I'll go and help Mary with the milking." Five minutes later she was seated on a low stool beside her favourite cow, Beauty, which had been reared on the farm, and named by Ruth herself, who petted and talked to her like an old friend. The afternoon was very warm, but still and sweet and quiet, with the summer hush upon everything, even the lowing of the cows in the farm-yard, the murmur of the brook, and the voices of the workers in the distant hay-field. "Ah me, old Beauty!" sighed Ruth, as she pressed the milk into the pail, "mother says that it is the same thing over and over again all our lives, and I suppose it is true, but I wish I could have something different." Beauty only lowed; but if she could have spoken English she might have said, "If _you_ find life monotonous, what must it be for me? In the morning I rise and crop the grass, then I come in to be milked. I go back to the meadow and bathe in the stream or eat as much grass as I want; in the afternoon I lie under the shade of the trees and chew the cud; and in the evening I come again to be milked, and once more return to the meadows. If I have a calf of my own, it is taken from me and sent--I know not where. Yes, it is the same thing over and over again. Yet I am quite content."