rself
in an envelope and send herself home to her mother, instead of waiting
for Christmas. Ruby was doing so well that both her Aunt Emma and her
father and mother wanted her to stay until the end of the term at any
rate. Ruby hoped that when she went home she would be able to take
with her at least one of the five prizes which were to be given at
Christmas. There was a composition prize, a deportment prize, a prize
for grammar, one for spelling, and one for improvement in music. Ruby
had worked so hard in all her classes, and had been so careful to keep
all the rules, that she was quite sure that she should take at least
one prize home with her to show her father and mother how hard she had
tried to be good.

If Ruthy could only have been with her, Ruby would have been quite
contented; but with all her new friends she still missed the dear
little friend who had been like a sister to her all her life.

A great many things that had seemed hard to Ruby when she first came
were becoming so natural to her now that she never thought anything
about them. The courtesying was no longer any trouble to her; on the
contrary, she really liked it, and she amused her Aunt Emma one day by
telling her that she thought that when she went home she should always
courtesy to her father and mother when she went out of the room; for if
it was respectful to courtesy to her teachers, it was certainly
respectful to courtesy to any one else of whom she thought a great
deal. She had learned to like egg-plant just as well as she did
anything else, so her trouble over that had melted away into thin air;
and she had found Agnes Van Kirk a very good friend to have, for she
was a little girl who tried very hard to do right herself, and helped
Ruby to do right, too.

Agnes was going to be a teacher some day, she hoped, and she was very
fond of talking to Ruby about her plans. She was going to have a large
boarding-school, and she was not quite sure whether she would have her
girls courtesy or not when they went out of a room.

"Perhaps it will be old-fashioned by that time, you know," she said to
Ruby, when the two girls had counted how many years must pass away
before Agnes should have completed her education and opened her school.
"Of course I should not teach my girls to do old-fashioned things, that
would make people laugh at them, but I want them to do everything that
is nice. I mean to be such a teacher as Miss Chapman. She never
s