For a time the game of geography became so absorbing Marian played it at the table, forming snowy peaks of mashed potatoes and sprinkling salt upon the summits until the drifts were so deep, only the valleys below were fit to be eaten. Brown gravy was always the Missouri River winding its way across Marian's plate between banks of vegetables. Ice cream meant Mammoth Cave. A piece of pie was South Africa from which the Cape of Good Hope quickly disappeared. However hungry Marian might be, there was a time when she ate nothing but continents and islands. Whatever Miss Virginia Smith tried to teach the country children, Marian Lee appropriated for herself. She listened to all recitations whether of the chart class or the big boys and girls. Perhaps if Marian had attended more strictly to her own lessons, she might have made the kind of a record she thought would please Uncle George. As it was, Jimmie Black "Left off head" in the spelling class more times than she did, the first month. Belle Newman had higher standings in arithmetic and geography, and some one carried off all the other honors. Marian, however, knew something about botany before the end of May, and she gloried in the fact that she could name all the bones in her body. Mr. Golding was proud of her accomplishment and once when she went with him to see old Bess newly shod, he asked her to name the bones for the blacksmith: and the blacksmith thought it wonderful that a little girl knew so much. "Yes, but that's nothing," remarked the child, "all the big boys and girls in the fifth reader class know their bones." "Ain't you in the fifth reader?" asked the blacksmith. "No," was the reply, "I can read the whole reader through, but I'm not in that reader class. That's the highest class in the country. I suppose being in the fifth reader here is like being in the high school at home just before you graduate. I won't have to learn bones when I get up to the high school." "And still you say that ain't nothing," protested the blacksmith. Marian shook her head. "I haven't done one thing in school better'n anybody else," she said, "and to do something better'n anybody else is all that counts. Don't you try to be the best blacksmither in the country?" Old Bess flourished her tail in the blacksmith's face and the man spoke to her next instead of to Marian. He wasn't the best blacksmith and he knew it. Some years afterwards when he had won an enviable reputation, he told Mr. Golding that the first time he thought of trying to do unusually good work was when the little Lee girl asked him if he tried to be the best blacksmith in the country.