nd about averages. I can't think why people are so
fond of taking them,--men generally. It seems to me they tell anything
but the truth. They try to tell what happens every evening, and they
don't tell one evening right.

There was our Free Evening Cooking-school. We had a class of fourteen
girls; and they admired it, and liked nothing better, and attended
regularly. But Ann Maria made out the report according to the average of
attendance on the whole number of nights in the ten weeks of the school,
one evening a week; so she gave the numbers 12-3/5 each night.

Now the fact was, they all came every night except one, when there was
such a storm, nobody went,--not even the teacher, nor Ann Maria, nor any
of us. It snowed and it hailed and the wind blew, and our steps were so
slippery Amanda could not go out to put on ashes; ice even on the upper
steps. The janitor, who makes the fire, set out to go; but she was blown
across the street, into the gutter. She did succeed in getting in to Ann
Maria's, who said it was foolish to attempt it, and that nobody would
go; and I am not sure but she spent the night there,--at Ann Maria's, I
mean. Still, Ann Maria had to make up the account of the number of
evenings of the whole course.

But it looks, in the report, as though there were never the whole
fourteen there, and as though 1-2/5 of a girl stayed away every night,
when the facts are we did not have a single absence, and the whole
fourteen were there every night, except the night there was no school;
and I have been told they all had on their things to come that night,
but their mothers would not let them,--those that had mothers,--and they
would have been blown away if they had come.

It seems to me the report does not present the case right, on account of
the averages.

I think it is indeed the common things that trouble one to decide about,
as I have said, since for the remarkable ones one can have advice. The
way we do on such occasions is to ask our friends, especially the lady
from Philadelphia.

Whatever we should have done without her, I am sure I cannot tell, for
her advice is always inestimable. To be sure, she is not always here;
but there is the daily mail (twice from here to Boston), and the
telegraph, and to some places the telephone.

But for some common things there is not time for even the telephone.

* * * * *

Yesterday morning, for instance, going into Boston in the e