its name,--and that
sprawling one that looks like a snail crawling out of its shell: the
devil's coffin, I believe it's called technically. And--oh, yes! they
give you originals--_frightful_ originals, like nothing you've ever had
before; and they put a little note at the top of the page telling you to
do them first, and you get so muddled trying to think fast that you
can't think at all. I know a girl who spent all the two hours trying to
think out an original, and just as she got ready to write it down the
bell rang and she had to hand in her paper."

"And what happened?"

"Oh, she flunked. You couldn't really blame the instructor, you know,
for not reading between the lines, for there weren't any lines to read
between; but it was sort of a pity, for the girl really knew an awful
lot--but she couldn't express it."

"That's just like me."

"Ah, it's like a good many people." A silence ensued, and the freshmen
looked at one another dejectedly. "But you can live, even if you should
flunk math," Patty continued reassuringly. "Other people have done it
before you."

"If it were only geometry--but we're scared over Latin."

"Oh, Latin! There's no use studying for that, for you can't possibly
read it all over, and if you just pick out a part, it's sure not to be
the same part _they_ pick out. The best way is to say incantations over
the book, and open it with your eyes blindfolded, and study the page it
opens to; then, in case you don't pass,--and you probably won't,--you
can throw the blame on fate. My freshman year, if I remember right, they
gave us for prose composition one of Emerson's essays to translate into
Latin, and we couldn't even tell what it meant in English."

The three looked at one another again.

"I couldn't do anything like that."

"Nor I."

"Nor I."

"Nor any one else," said Patty.

"We can flunk Latin and math; but if we flunk any more we're gone."

"I believe so," said Patty.

"And I'm awfully shaky in German."

"And I in French."

"And I in Greek."

"I don't know anything about German," said Patty. "Never had it myself.
But I remember hearing Priscilla say that the printed examination papers
didn't come but in time, and Fraeulein Scherin, who writes a frightful
hand, wrote the questions on the board in German script, and they
couldn't even read them. In French I believe the first question was to
write out the 'Marseillaise'; there are seven verses, and no one had
learned them, an