It was the greatest effort of self-denial that I could well have attempted, for besides the heroism required to give up my walk with Mr. Rutledge, on this splendid day, and spending the morning instead with the only person I sincerely disliked in the house, and in the room of all others that I was most averse to, was added my unconquerable detestation of mathematical calculations of all kinds. From the multiplication table up, I held all such exercises in abomination. But Miss Crowen, with her usual discrimination, having detected this weak point in my character, bent her whole mind to the strengthening of it, and night and day, labored to instill into my unwilling brain the rules and methods it was constitutionally unfitted to receive. Other studies were made to bend before it; favorite pursuits were sacrificed to this one object; passionate tears had washed the distracting figures from the hated slate; high tragedy had been enacted before the blackboard, and stormy scenes in the study had only strengthened Miss Crowen in her determination to enforce obedience, and her pupil in resistance to what she looked upon as tyrannical injustice. The result of this continued struggle was, that after nearly five years of drilling in that branch of study, to the exclusion of more congenial pursuits, I left St. Catharine's with about the amount of mathematical knowledge usually acquired by girls of ordinary application in a year and a half. I was too fresh, however, from such exercises, not to be quite competent to master the difficulties presented in the Rutledge "Household Expenses," and before an hour had passed, had reduced the "snarl" to a very comprehensible state, and calling to Mrs. Roberts to come and look over it, I began to explain the errors I had found, and the manner in which I had corrected them, in as lucid language as I could command.