For a long time Mrs. Colston and Phebe had been of the opinion that Bessie would never make much progress while under her mother's roof. Both mother and daughter loved each other (there was no doubt about that), but they did not rest each other. Mrs. Marchant was a fretful woman; family cares had shattered her nerves; Bessie was all alive--"life in every limb" was intensely true about her three times over--and so they constantly irritated each other. As Bessie was washing up the tea-things one day, feeling very down-hearted, even dropping a tear now and again, she thought she would banish her gloom with a little song, and so piped up on her loudest key: "I'm sweeping through the gates;" not remembering more than one verse, the chorus was repeated several times. "Sakes alive!" screamed out the mother from the kitchen, "do stop that. Do, for goodness' sake, finish your sweeping, girl, and get through the gates and stop there!" "I only wish I could," replied Bessie, but not loud enough for the mother to hear. Soon after that she noticed her brother's jacket had slipped off a chair in the kitchen, where he had thrown it, and while she was sitting mending some stockings, she saw something moving on it. For a minute or two she kept a most careful watch, then cautiously picked the coat up and hung it at the back of the door. When her brother came to put it on she gave a nervous little wriggle on her chair, but said nothing. At supper-time there was quite an explosion, the brother declaring she had put a black-beetle in his pocket, in spite of knowing how much he dreaded them; he had drawn it out with his handkerchief at a choir-practice, right in front of all the boys. "I never did!" protested Bessie. "You had something to do with it, I'm sure; else why did you so carefully hang my jacket up, without a word of fault-finding?" "I saw it walk into your pocket; that's a very different thing from putting it in," the girl frankly explained. Instead of the mother seeing any fun in the situation, and quietly pointing out where fun ends and unkindness begins, and forgetting the many practical jokes Bessie herself had good-naturedly endured at the hands of her brother, she literally stormed at Bessie, declaring she should leave home at once and be put to some business. Phebe hearing of all this, offered to take Bessie, to which the mother readily agreed. So it was a very short journey indeed Bessie took from home. Deep down in her heart the girl was very grieved at the way she had left home, but outwardly kept her usual brightness, and was indeed truly delighted at now really being "one of the company." "If ever I get rich," she exclaimed, "and have a coat-of-arms, I shall have a black-beetle on my quarterings, for it was a black-beetle which carried me here; a fine old ebony coachman! Oh, Mrs. Waring," and a sad note came into the girl's voice just then, "life often seems to me such a tangle and jingle!"