stored with all the facts which the curriculum of your
school affords, and you lack in the mental control which makes
them at your service, your education has only made your mind a
lumber-room, full perhaps to overflowing, but useless for the
great needs of life. Now you will wonder what all this has to do
with your being made uncomfortable, so that you could not study,
by the restlessness of your room-mates. If you begin at once to
fix your mind, as I hope you will soon be able to do, on your
lesson, you will be delighted to find how little you will be
disturbed by anything going on around you, and how soon your
ability to concentrate your working powers will increase.

"Try it faithfully, my dear one, and write me the result. I want
to send you one other help, which I am sure you will enjoy. In
your studies, make for yourself as much variety as possible. By
_that_, I mean when you are tired of your Latin do not take up
your Greek; take your mathematics, or your logic, or your
literature,--any study that will give you an entire change.
Change is rest; and this is truer even in mental work than in
physical. Above all, _do not worry_. Nothing deteriorates the
mind like this useless worry. When you have done your best over
a lesson, do not weary and weaken yourself by fears of failure
in your recitation room. Nothing will insure this failure so
certainly as to expect it. Cultivate the feeling that your
teacher is your friend, and more ready to help you, if you
falter, than to blame you. You think Miss Palmer is hard on you
in your mathematics, and don't like you. Avoid personalities. At
present, you probably annoy Miss Palmer by your blunders; but
that is class work, and I do not doubt a little sharpness on her
part is good for you; but, out of the recitation room, you are
only 'one of the girls,' and if you come in contact with her, I
have no doubt you will find her an agreeable lady. There is a
tinge of self-consciousness about this, which I am most anxious
for you to avoid. I want you to forget there is such a person in
the world as Marion Parke, in your school intercourse; but more
of this at another time."

Here follows a few pages written of the home-life, which Marion reads
with great tears in her eyes.

What her mother has written her Marion had heard many times before
leaving home, but its practical application now made it seem a
different