and that convoys of the precious fuel were scarcely to
be urged along the heavy ways.

This did not matter much to the equable temperature of Miss Marlett; but
it did matter a great deal to her shivering pupils, three of whom were
just speeding their morning toilette, by the light of one candle, at the
pleasant hour of five minutes to seven on a frosty morning.

"Oh dear," said one maiden--Janey Harman by name--whose blonde
complexion should have been pink and white, but was mottled with alien
and unbecoming hues, "_why_ won't that old Cat let us have fires to
dress by? Gracious, Margaret, how black your fingers are!"

"Yes; and I cant get them clean," said Margaret, holding up two very
pretty dripping hands, and quoting, in mock heroic parody:

"Ho, dogs of false Tarentum,
Are not my _hands_ washed white?"

"No talking in the bedrooms, young ladies," came a voice, accompanied by
an icy draught, from the door, which was opened just enough to admit a
fleeting vision of Miss Mariettas personal charms.

"I was only repeating my lay, Miss Marlett," replied the maiden thus
rebuked, in a tone of injured innocence--

"'Ho, dogs of false Tarentum,'"

--and the door closed again on Miss Marlett, who had not altogether the
best of it in this affair of outposts, and could not help feeling as if
"that Miss Shields" was laughing at her.

"Old Cat!" the young lady went on, in a subdued whisper. "But no wonder
my hands were a little black, Janey. You forget that it's my week to be
Stoker. Already, girls, by an early and unexpected movement, I have cut
off some of the enemy's supplies."

So speaking, Miss Margaret Shields proudly displayed a small deposit of
coals, stored, for secrecy, in the bottom of a clothes-basket.

"Gracious, Daisy, how clever! Well, you are something _like_ a stoker,"
exclaimed the third girl, who by this time had finished dressing: "we
shall have a blaze to-night."

Now, it must be said that at Miss Marlett's school, by an unusual and
inconsistent concession to comfort and saniitary principles, the elder
girls were allowed to have fires in their bed-rooms at night, in winter.
But seeing that these fires resembled the laughter of the wicked,
inasmuch as they were brief-lived as the crackling of thorns under pots,
the girls were driven to make predatory attacks on fuel wherever it
could be found. Sometimes, one is sorry to say, they robbed each
other's fireplaces, and concealed the c