Miss Clifford also sent for Beth, and requested her to repeat the story, that she might judge for herself if she should be allowed to go on with it; and Beth repeated it, being constrained; but the recital was so wearisome that Miss Clifford dismissed her before she was half-way through, with leave to finish it if anybody cared to hear it. When Thursday came, the girls and Miss Smallwood cared very much to hear it, and Beth, stimulated by their clamours, went on without a break for the whole hour, and ended with a description of a shipwreck, which was so vivid that the whole class was shaken with awe, and sat silent for a perceptible time after she stopped. Beth could rarely be persuaded to repeat this performance; but from that time her standing was unique, both with girls and mistresses, a fact, however, of which she herself was totally unaware. She felt her backwardness in school work and nothing else, and petitioned God incessantly to help her with her lessons, and get her put up; and put up she was regularly until she reached the third, when she was among the elder girls. She was never able to do the work properly of any class she was in, however, and her class mistresses were always against her being put up, but Miss Clifford insisted on it. Beth was never anything but miserable at school. The dull routine of the place pressed heavily upon her, and everything she had to do was irksome. The other girls accommodated themselves more or less successfully to the circumstances of their lives; but Beth in herself was always at war with her surroundings, and her busy brain teemed with ingenious devices to vary the monotony. The confinement, want of relaxation, and of proper physical training, very soon told upon her health and spirits, as indeed they did upon the greater number of the girls, who suffered unnecessarily in various ways. Beth very soon had to have an extra hour in bed in the morning, a cup of soup at eleven o'clock, a tonic three times a day, and a slice of thick bread and butter with a glass of stout on going to bed; such things were not stinted during Miss Clifford's administration; but it was a case of treating effects which all the time were being renewed by causes that might and ought to have been removed, but were let alone.