ntended to show her just
what she had lost.

One day Anne scurried excitedly into Priscilla's room.

"Read that," she cried, tossing Priscilla a letter. "It's from
Stella--and she's coming to Redmond next year--and what do you think of
her idea? I think it's a perfectly splendid one, if we can only carry it
out. Do you suppose we can, Pris?"

"I'll be better able to tell you when I find out what it is," said
Priscilla, casting aside a Greek lexicon and taking up Stella's letter.
Stella Maynard had been one of their chums at Queen's Academy and had
been teaching school ever since.

"But I'm going to give it up, Anne dear," she wrote, "and go to college
next year. As I took the third year at Queen's I can enter the Sophomore
year. I'm tired of teaching in a back country school. Some day I'm going
to write a treatise on 'The Trials of a Country Schoolmarm.' It will
be a harrowing bit of realism. It seems to be the prevailing impression
that we live in clover, and have nothing to do but draw our quarter's
salary. My treatise shall tell the truth about us. Why, if a week should
pass without some one telling me that I am doing easy work for big pay I
would conclude that I might as well order my ascension robe 'immediately
and to onct.' 'Well, you get your money easy,' some rate-payer will
tell me, condescendingly. 'All you have to do is to sit there and hear
lessons.' I used to argue the matter at first, but I'm wiser now.
Facts are stubborn things, but as some one has wisely said, not half so
stubborn as fallacies. So I only smile loftily now in eloquent silence.
Why, I have nine grades in my school and I have to teach a little of
everything, from investigating the interiors of earthworms to the study
of the solar system. My youngest pupil is four--his mother sends him to
school to 'get him out of the way'--and my oldest twenty--it 'suddenly
struck him' that it would be easier to go to school and get an education
than follow the plough any longer. In the wild effort to cram all sorts
of research into six hours a day I don't wonder if the children feel
like the little boy who was taken to see the biograph. 'I have to look
for what's coming next before I know what went last,' he complained. I
feel like that myself.

"And the letters I get, Anne! Tommy's mother writes me that Tommy is not
coming on in arithmetic as fast as she would like. He is only in simple
reduction yet, and Johnny Johnson is in fractions, and Johnny is