you have to yourself?"

"Sometimes. Not always. Sometimes I cannot get through with my
lessons, and they stretch on into the evening."

"How many lessons does this lady think a person of your age and
capacity can manage in the twenty-four hours?" said the doctor, taking
out his knife as he spoke and beginning to trim the thorns off a bit
of sweetbriar he had cut. I stopped to make the reckoning.

"Give me the course of your day, Daisy. And by-the-by when does your
day begin?"

"It begins at half past seven, Dr. Sandford."

"With breakfast?"

"No, sir. I have a recitation before breakfast."

"Please of what?"

"Miss Pinshon always begins with mathematics."

"As a bitters. Do you find that it gives you an appetite?"

By this time I was very near bursting into tears. The familiar voice
and way, the old time they brought back, the contrasts they forced
together, the different days of Melbourne and of my Southern home, the
forms and voices of mamma and papa, they all came crowding and
flitting before me. I was obliged to delay my answer. I knew that Dr.
Sandford looked at me; then he went on in a very gentle way--

"Sweetbriar is sweet, Daisy,"--putting it to my nose. "I should like
to know how long does mathematics last, before you are allowed to have
coffee?"

"Mathematics only lasts half an hour. But then I have an hour of study
in mental philosophy before breakfast. We breakfast at nine."

"It must take a great deal of coffee to wash down all that," said the
doctor, lazily trimming his sweetbriar. "Don't you find that you are
very hungry when you come to breakfast?"

"No, not generally," I said.

"How is that? where there is so much sharpening of the wits, people
ought to be sharp otherwise."

"My wits do not get sharpened," I said, half laughing. "I think they
get dull; and I am often dull altogether by breakfast time."

"What time in the day do you walk?"

"In the afternoon, when we have done with the schoolroom. But lately
Miss Pinshon does not walk much."

"So you take the best of the day for philosophy?"

"No, sir, for mathematics."

"Oh! Well, Daisy, _after_ philosophy and mathematics have both had
their turn, what then?--when breakfast is over."

"Oh, they have two or three more turns in the course of the day," I
said. "Astronomy comes after breakfast; then Smith's 'Wealth of
Nations;' then chemistry. Then I have a long history lesson to recite;
then French. After dinner we have natura