curely to its intermittent studies.

Elizabeth soon ceased to trouble much even over spelling, and she and
Rosie gave themselves up to the fashion of the hour. And every hour
had its fashion. For like most rural schools, amongst the girls at
least, Forest Glen was a place of fads and fancies.

No one ever knew just how or why a new craze arose, but there was
always one on the tapis. At one time it was pickles. No one could
hope for any social recognition unless one had a long, green cucumber
pickle in one's dinner-pail--the longer the pickle the higher one's
standing. Fads ranged all the way from this gastronomic level to the
highly esthetic, where they broke out in a desire for the decorative in
the form of peep-shows. A peep-show was an arrangement of flowers and
leaves pressed against a piece of glass and framed in colored
tissue-paper. Every girl had one on her desk; even to dirty, unkempt
Becky Davis. Elizabeth was not a success at such works of art. She
was a wonder at inventing new patterns, and gained recognition from
even the big girls by suggesting a design of tiny, scarlet maple
leaves, green moss, and gold thread. But when it came to construction,
she left that to Rosie and took to drawing new designs on her slate.
No one could compete with Rosie anyway. She had something new and more
elaborate each morning.

But the craze for peep-shows was superseded early in Miss Hillary's
reign by an entirely new fad, such as had never manifested itself
before in any marked degree in the school. Miss Hillary, quite
unwittingly, started it herself.

It was a warm, languorous afternoon in October, and time hung as
heavily over the heads of the pupils as the mists hung over the
amethyst hollows and sunny hills of Forest Glen. It was Thursday and
Miss Hillary was writing at her desk. Lottie Price, the biggest girl
in school and the most curious and observing, wrote a note to Teenie
Johnstone to say she bet anything the teacher was writing to her
fellow. Lottie knew, because Miss Hillary often looked straight at you
and didn't see you at all. That was a sure sign. In the back seat,
John Gordon and the Pretender, as everyone now called Charles Stuart,
were silently but busily whittling away, constructing part of a
wonderful new kind of ground-hog trap. Elizabeth had filled one side
of her slate with an elaborate picture of a castle on a hill, a stream,
a lake, a ship, and an endless vista of town and road