The 'Zend-Avesta' made a handsome second; but as she did not desire to smother her audience under the load of erudition, she considerately offered it as an alternative to the Rig Veda. "A Saga" came next--she did not specify which. Her familiarity with Scandinavian literature was not intimate enough to particularise; but as not one of her audience would know anything about it, that made little difference. Being minded that nothing she said should savour of the too familiar, she gave Klopstock the first place in her German list rather than Goethe; and for the same reason Marlowe led off her English dramatists, with Shakespeare far down among the ruck. Then there were Hegel and Haekel, with permission to add the 'Critique of Pure Reason' for those who relished intellectual nut-cracking. There was to have been a name or two from every tribe and tongue in Europe; but in her ignorance she could think of no Russian but Turguenief; and when she came to the Lapps, Finns, Liths, and Basques, they had no literary representative whom she had ever heard of. After that she took up a publisher's list and filled up the remaining sixty places at random. What did it matter? People would read what they liked or understood. If they did not understand, it could not influence them one way or other. She knew as well as you or I do, reader, that wheat is not grown on pure sand; that loams, clays, moulds, each produce a vegetation limited by their capacity; that everything will not grow everywhere, and that, if it could, it would not be worth much. But while the public laboured under the fad of comprehensiveness, she recognised that she, its servant, must be comprehensive too, or her employer would pay her off and get some one else who was up to its standard. No one person could read, or, if they could, would care to read, a tenth part of the literature upon her list; but that she considered the one useful element in what she was about. It introduced a moral influence. It would keep her audience humble--an end not always easy to achieve where that audience is feminine, and more richly endowed with aspiration than with solid learning--and show them how much there still was which they did not know, notwithstanding their acquirements. There came a timid knock at the door, and a second, which the Principal heard; and laying down her pen she sat bolt-upright and said, "Come in." It was Maida Springer who entered. At the sight of her subordinate looking crushed and wan, the Principal's aspect softened. Her impatience of interruption gave place to those motherly instincts which nestled sweet and fresh about her heart, though usually sheltered and concealed from an uncongenial world under the dry husk of her superior-woman-hood. "You--Maida?... I had almost given up hope of seeing you again. But have you been sick? You do not look much benefited by your stay at the shore--rather the other way."