blood-chilling tone of an Indian's
battle-shriek, Myrtle caught the knife up, and raised her arm against the
girl who had thus rudely assailed her. The girl sank to the ground,
covering her eyes in her terror. Myrtle, with her arm still lifted, and
the blade glistening in her hand, stood over her, rigid as if she had
been suddenly changed to stone. Many of those looking on thought all
this was a part of the show, and were thrilled with the wonderful acting.
Before those immediately around her had had time to recover from the
palsy of their fright Myrtle had flung the knife away from her, and was
kneeling, her head bowed and her hands crossed upon her breast. The
audience went into a rapture of applause as the curtain came suddenly
down; but Myrtle had forgotten all but the dread peril she had just
passed, and was thanking God that his angel--her own protecting spirit,
as it seemed to her had stayed the arm which a passion such as her nature
had never known, such as she believed was alien to her truest self, had
lifted with deadliest purpose. She alone knew how extreme the danger had
been. "She meant to scare her,--that 's all," they said. But Myrtle tore
the eagle's feathers from her hair, and stripped off her colored beads,
and threw off her painted robe. The metempsychosis was far too real for
her to let her wear the semblance of the savage from whom, as she
believed, had come the lawless impulse at the thought of which her soul
recoiled in horror.

"Pocahontas has got a horrid headache," the managing young ladies gave it
out, "and can't come to time for the last tableau." So this all passed
over, not only without loss of credit to Myrtle, but with no small
addition to her local fame,--for it must have been acting; "and was n't
it stunning to see her with that knife, looking as if she was going to
stab Bells, or to scalp her, or something?"

As Master Gridley had predicted, and as is the case commonly with
new-comers at colleges and schools, Myrtle had come first in contact with
those who were least agreeable to meet. The low-bred youth who amuse
themselves with scurvy tricks on freshmen, and the vulgar girls who try
to show off their gentility to those whom they think less important than
themselves, are exceptions in every institution; but they make themselves
odiously prominent before the quiet and modest young people have had time
to gain the new scholar's confidence. Myrtle found friends in due time,
som