r, and while away a quarter of an hour in adding ornamental
flourishes to the double lines, and in elaborately darkening the down-
strokes of her capitals. Then she would scribble on her blotting-paper,
dropping intentional blots upon a clean page, and weaving them into a
connected picture with no little skill and ingenuity. At this point a
sharp reminder from teacher or scholar would bring her back to another
melancholy perusal of the paper, and she would read and read the
questions, in the melancholy hope of finding them grown more easy for
the time of waiting.

Sometimes a query was put in so straightforward a form that it was
possible to answer it in a single word, and then with glee Pixie would
print "Question two" in ornamental characters, and write "Yes!"
underneath it with a glow of exhilaration. At other times, as in the
grammar paper, a question would make no calls on the memory, but would,
so to speak, supply its own material, when she attacked it with more
haste than discretion in her delight at finding something which she
could really accomplish.

To give an example--Miss Bruce, the English teacher, quoted the
sentence, "How sharper than a serpent's tooth is an ungrateful child!"
and asked to have it paraphrased so as to show the two predicates which
made it into a complex sentence. Pixie licked her lips over this
opportunity, and squeak, squeak, squeak, went her pen along the paper,
making the other girls look up and raise their eyebrows at one another
in surprised comment. Writing at last, and so eagerly too! Pixie must
surely have an inspiration at last; and so she had, for the big straggly
writing set forth an extraordinary sentence: "How sharper it is to have
an ungrateful child, than it is to have a serpent's tooth!"

"Humph!" mused Pixie, gnawing her pen, "there's a queer sound to it too.
If I didn't know for sure it was right, I'd be just as certain it was
wrong!" and so the paraphrase remained, to astonish the eyes of Miss
Bruce, and give her a hearty laugh in the midst of the dreary work of
reading examination papers that evening.

"Well, who comes out first in the exams it is impossible to say, but
there is no doubt who will be last! I don't think Pixie O'Shaughnessy
will get more than a dozen marks for a single paper she has written,"
was the remark of a certain Evelyn, one of the leaders of the anti-Pixie
faction, on the day before the breaking-up party. "We used to think her
clever