mmon, and they
were letting in very queer folks.

Still another trial awaited Myrtle, and one which not one girl in a
thousand would have been so unprepared to meet. She knew absolutely
nothing of certain things with which the vast majority of young persons
were quite familiar.

There were literary young ladies, who had read everything of Dickens and
Thackeray, and something at least of Sir Walter, and occasionally,
perhaps, a French novel, which they had better have left alone. One of
the talking young ladies of this set began upon Myrtle one day.

"O, isn't Pickwick nice?" she asked.

"I don't know," Myrtle replied; "I never tasted any."

The girl stared at her as if she were a crazy creature. "Tasted any!
Why, I mean the Pickwick Papers, Dickens's story. Don't you think
they're nice?"

Poor Myrtle had to confess that she had never read them, and didn't know
anything about them.

"What! did you never read any novels?" said the young lady.

"O, to be sure I have," said Myrtle, blushing as she thought of the
great trunk and its contents. "I have read Caleb Williams, and Evelina,
and Tristram Shandy" (naughty girl!), "and the Castle of Otranto, and
the Mysteries of Udolpho, and the Vicar of Wakefield, and Don
Quixote--"

The young lady burst out laughing. "Stop! stop! for mercy's sake," she
cried. "You must be somebody that's been dead and buried and come back
to life again. Why you're Rip Van Winkle in a petticoat! You ought to
powder your hair and wear patches."

"We've got the oddest girl here," this young lady wrote home. "She
hasn't read any book that isn't a thousand years old. One of the girls
says she wears a trilobite for a breastpin; some horrid old stone, I
believe that is, that was a bug ever so long ago. Her name, she says, is
Myrtle Hazard, but I call her Rip Van Myrtle."

Notwithstanding the quiet life which these young girls were compelled to
lead, they did once in a while have their gatherings, at which a few
young gentlemen were admitted. One of these took place about a month
after Myrtle had joined the school. The girls were all in their best,
and by and by they were to have a _tableau_. Myrtle came out in all her
force. She dressed herself as nearly as she dared like the handsome
woman of the past generation whom she resembled. The very spirit of the
dead beauty seemed to animate every feature and every movement of the
young girl, whose position in the school was assured from that moment