graduate from Briarwood Hall.

The thought of graduating from the school they loved so much was one of
mingled pleasure and pain. Old Briarwood! where they had had so much
fun--so many girlish sorrows--friends, enemies, struggles, triumphs,
failures and successes! Neither chum could contemplate graduation lightly.

"If we go to college together, it will never seem like Briarwood Hall,"
Helen sighed. "College will be so _big_. We shall be lost among so many
girls--some of them grown women!"

"Goodness!" laughed Ruth, suddenly, "we'll be almost 'grown women'
ourselves before we get through college."

"Oh, don't!" exclaimed Helen. "I don't want to think of _that_."

What was ahead of the chums did trouble them. Their future school life was
a mystery. There was no prophet to tell them of the exciting and really
wonderful things that were to happen to them at Briarwood during the
coming term.

CHAPTER VII

"SWEETBRIARS ALL"

"Oh, dear me!" complained Nettie Parsons, "I never can do it."

"'In the bright Lexicon of Youth, there is no such word as "fail,"'"
quoted Mercy Curtis, grandiloquently.

"That must be a pretty poor reference book to have in one's library,
then," said Helen, making fun of the old saying which the lame girl had
repeated. "How do we know--perhaps there are other important words left
out--_A bas le_ Lexicon of Youth!"

"Perseverence is the winning game, Nettie," Ruth said to the Southern
girl, cheerfully. "Stick to it."

"And if _then_ you can't make the sum come right, come to Aunt Ruthie and
_ask_. That's what _I_ do," confessed Ann Hicks, the ranch girl.

"Perseverence wins," quoth Helen.

"Oh, it does, does it?" cried Jennie Stone, called by the girls "Heavy,"
in a smothered tone, for her mouth was full of caramels. "Let me tell you
that old 'saw' is a joke. My little kid cousin proved that the other day.
She came to grandfather--who is just as full of maxims and bits of wisdom
as Helen seems to be to-day, and the kid said:

"'Grandpa, that's a joke about "If at first you don't succeed," isn't it?'

"And her grandfather answered, 'Certainly not. "Try, try again." That's
right.'

"'Huh!' said the kid, who is one of these Cynthia-of-the-minute'
youngsters, 'you're wrong, Grandpa. I've been working for an hour blowing
soapbubbles and trying to pin them on a clothes line in the nursery to
dry!' Perseverence didn't cut much of a figure in her case, did it?"
finished Heavy, with