"I don't believe children went home from boarding-schools for it though. If you read old-fashioned books you will notice that the boys always talk of 'a half' as if they stayed from Midsummer to Christmas, and from Christmas to Midsummer again. It must have seemed such a long while." "I think it must have been perfectly horrible to go to school then," said Nina Forster. "My grandmother tells me stories about when she was a little girl, and I should have hated it. They had to learn their lessons off by heart, and stand with their hands behind their backs and say them just like parrots, and if they forgot or made a mistake the governess rapped them on the head with her thimble. She called it 'thimble pie'. It used to make them too nervous to remember things." "How nasty of her! What else did they do?" asked the girls, who liked to be told tales while they lounged. "They had to use backboards every day, and chest expanders. Then they had much plainer food than we have, and they were obliged to finish up every morsel upon their plates; they mightn't leave anything. They always had brown bread except on Sundays, and rice puddings nearly every day. They hardly ever went picnics or excursions; they only used to go for stupid walks along the roads, two and two, with a mistress at each end. The music teacher had a silver pencil with a heavy knob at the end, and if a girl played a wrong note she used to bring it down with a thump upon her hand. Granny says it made her hate music. Then they mightn't send letters home without the headmistress seeing them, and she used to make them write the most absurd rubbish, so that they weren't their own letters at all. Granny had her twelfth birthday at school, and when she wrote to thank her father for his present the governess insisted on her putting: 'Now that I have attained to my twelfth year I feel I am no longer a child, and must put away childish things'. Wasn't it stupid? They used to write the most beautiful hand, though, far, far neater than ours, but they took a fearfully long time over it. They'd spend a week at an exercise that we do in a day. The teachers were very strict and very cross, and there seemed to be so many punishments--being sent to bed, and being kept in, and learning long columns of spelling. Granny says girls are spoilt now, but I know I'd rather go to Miss Kaye's than to the school she was at." "I should think so," said the others; "I don't believe any other could be really nicer than this." "I sometimes wish I'd gone to a different one, though," said Jessie Ellis. "Why?"