ll comb in her hair, not quite as large as a small
chaise-top. She looked like other people, and Patty was sadly
disappointed. There was an hour-glass on the desk full of dripping sand,
and Patty wanted to shake it to make the sand go out faster, for she
grew very tired of sitting still so long hearing the children read,
"Pretty cow, go there and dine." She was afraid to say her letters; but
after she had said them, was much prouder than the Speaker of the Senate
after he has made a very eloquent speech. She had nothing more to do,
and watched the little girls working their samplers. Her sister Mary,
not yet eight years old, was making a beautiful one, with a flower-pot
in one corner and a tree and birds in the other, and some lines in the
middle like these:--

"EDUCATION.

"Be this Miss Mary's care:
Let this her thoughts engage;
Be this the business of her youth,
The comfort of her age."

Patty looked on, and watched Mary's needle going in and out, making
little red crooks. She did not know the silk letters, and would not have
understood the verse if she had heard it read; but neither did the big
sister understand it herself.

"Be _this_ the business of her youth," Mary thought meant the _sampler_,
for really that sampler _had_ been the business of her youth ever since
she had learned to hold a needle, and the tree wasn't done yet, and the
flowers were flying out of the flower-pot on account of having no stems
to stand on. Patty was ashamed because she herself had no canvass with
silk pictures on it to carry out to the "mistress." The more she
thought about it, the more restless she grew, till before noon she fell
to crying, and said aloud,--

"_I_ want to work a _sambler_; yes, I do."

Miss Judkins told Mary she had better take her home. Patty felt
disgraced, and cried all the way, she did not really know what for.
Sometimes she thought it was because the school was such a poor place to
go to, and then again she thought it was because she wanted to work a
"sambler." When they got home she did not wait till they were fairly in
the house, but called out, with a loud voice,--

"O, mamma! She's only a woman! The mistress is only a woman!"

That was all the way she had of telling how cruelly disappointed she
felt in the school.

Mrs. Lyman had just put the baby in the cradle, and was now rocking
little Solly, who was crying with a stone bruise in the bottom of his
foot. Betsey Gould was was