out Mrs. Chaporee's Letters and The Serious Call; and Mrs. Selden said she thought it very bad for a girl's future to be reading novels all the time. Alas! when I was put through a severe examination I stood A No. 1 in Scott, Bulwer, Edgeworth, and Miss Austen, but I did not know much geography nor the least arithmetic, so I was marched into my father's office, where he was at work upon a complicated law-case. My mother, as beautiful and quite as severe as Dante's avenging angel, stood pale and terrible, addressing the busy man (who found it quite inconvenient to receive us at that time) with these words, which are burned into my heart: "Colonel Wilson, here is our daughter, whom we have sent to Miss Fiske's school, and of whose abilities and studious habits we had hoped so much. She was reading a novel at two o'clock last night, and she cannot parse a word of Paradise Lost. She cannot bound Pennsylvania, she does not know where Jerusalem is, and she thinks six times six may be forty."
My father's sense of humor was so strong that he burst into a fit of laughter which shook the house, and I burst into tears. He took me to that ample breast of his, and said, "Never mind, we will send you to Boston to school. Don't cry. Don't read so many novels, and obey your mother. But how does it happen that you do not know the multiplication-table?"
"Father, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it! — so I write Matilda Slocum's compositions, and she does my sums."
"Well," said he, "you have been cheating yourself most bravely. Let Matilda's compositions alone, and do you tell me the 'nines and sixes' to-morrow night at dinner."
So a very delightful dinner of turkey was spoiled for
