Certainly, if I had looked upon Grace as a marvel of sharpness last night, my respect for her in that regard, suffered no diminution after seeing the manner in which she slipped through Mr. Olman's literary fingers, and came out triumphant at the end of the two hours, without the vaguest idea of what he had been laboring at. She hated history, philosophy, and the belles-lettres, and never thought of preparing the abstracts and reviews that he requested; and as he was unspeakably afraid of her himself, she found no difficulty in eluding the detested tasks. He was a slim young man, dressing in black and wearing spectacles--very nervous and very much given to blushing. Indeed, his face, at the end of the lesson, was ordinarily of a violent _rose de chine_ color, and his hands so trembling and cold, that it was a great relief to me when he succeeded in collecting his books and papers and getting on his overcoat. I never saw so merciless a persecution; the slyest, "cutest," and the most naïve way of tripping him up in the full tide of his discourse, and then bewailing her mistake; never by any chance omitting an opportunity of making him blush and putting him in an agony of nervousness. I am certain, so acutely did he suffer at her hands, that if in an unguarded moment he had been brought to acknowledge who of all others he most detested and dreaded, he would have answered, unhesitatingly, "my pupil, from two to four, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday." Indignant as I felt at Grace, it was no easy matter to keep from laughing at the results of her pertness and _aplomb;_ and notwithstanding Mr. Olman was evidently a well-read and cultivated scholar, I anticipated in these lessons more of pain than of pleasure; and although I determined to apply myself thoroughly to all he directed, still, four o'clock was, and would, I feared, continue to be, a release. At dinner, that evening, Grace gave the bulletin of "Mr. Olman's latest," and though her mother reproved her, no one thought it necessary to discourage her by not laughing. Phil's "Ha! ha!" was honest and unequivocal; he meant, he declared, some day to secrete himself under the piano, and see Grace put the professor to rout and confusion. He hated professors, for his part, and he'd like to see 'em all put to rout and confusion. "Professors arn't in your line, are they, Phil?" said Grace, with a laugh. "I beg, Phil," exclaimed Josephine, "that you'll never present yourself unexpectedly to that wretched man. I am sure he'd swoon at the sight of your breadth of shoulder and length of limb. You'd make at least three of him." "Say four," put in Grace. "The professor doesn't weigh an ounce over thirty-five pounds. I asked him, the other day, apropos of ancient weights and measures, if he'd ever been weighed, and what the result was." "You saucy child," said Phil, "I wonder he didn't box your ears."