as Americans express it,
whenever and wherever she could get a chance.

Nor did Miss Etta mind work. She was a girl of energy, who would
willingly walk miles to attend a picnic or climb a mountain, and she did
not hesitate to work for hours on a trimming for her dress, or even some
more useful piece of sewing. She was always having _furores_ for
something; at one time it was gardening, when she coaxed her father to
have a good-sized piece of ground dug up and laid out for her, and
actually raised, not flowers, as one would expect, but quite respectable
vegetables, hoeing the beans, corn, and cabbages herself, and weeding
out the cucumbers, lettuce, and radishes with persistent fidelity.

At another time she had a poultry-mania, and a chicken-house with the
most approved nests, warming-apparatus, etc., was constructed for the
little lady, and here she daily set the hens, fed the chickens, and
collected the eggs, selling them to her father at exorbitant prices.
Again, cooking absorbed her time and gave occupation to her energies;
and the family were treated to strange compounds of her concocting,
while the old servant who reigned supreme in the kitchen was in the
depths of despair at the number of dishes and pans she was called upon
to clear up, the waste and breakage that went on, and the general
disorganization of her lifelong arrangements.

Happily, or unhappily, these moods never were of long duration. The
reading-mania lasted just long enough for a handsome bookcase to be
stocked with histories, biographies, etc.; a few volumes of poems were
dipped into, several novels read, and a big history attacked, when the
mood changed into a passion for skating, and the remainder of the winter
was consumed in preparing a fancy costume, getting the most approved
club-skates, and learning to keep upright upon them; but by the time so
much was accomplished, the ice broke up and Miss Etta was obliged to
find some other occupation. Art came next in the list of the girl's
absorbing avocations. A studio was fitted up, canvas stretched upon
easels, pencils sharpened, and quite a creditable beginning made upon
some pictures which showed considerable native taste and ability.

Just now Sunday-school teaching had taken the place of all other things,
and Etta Mountjoy devoted the energies of her many-sided nature to her
class. There had been more than one person opposed to entrusting so
sacred a work to so light-minded and trivial a gi