Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PART II. Boarding-school life was Annie's next experience. With school, the ideal school, her child imagination had been familiar; tales of school life having taken their turn amongst scenes, P. D., and other story conversation, when teachers and scholars, companionship and talk were mapped out with great clearness, set in a charming haze of indefinable possibilities. School real was, perhaps, not much like school ideal, but the time that Annie spent there was made rich by the forming of one or two friendships as beautiful as any which her imagination had drawn. Amongst the girls Annie soon became a great favourite; with the teachers, and with the modes of instruction which obtained at the school, she was not so much in accord. The week-day classes ran a curious dull little round. English, Grecian, and Roman histories were read by turns, half an hour being allowed for each at a time; the pupils looked at the backs of the books, to be quite sure where they were. Annie was never thought exactly clever by her nstructors ; out-of-the-way scraps of knowledge cameso much more readily to hand with her than did just the particular things that she was expected to have at her fingers' ends, and a thirst for any sort of knowledge outside the ordinary school routine was not a distinguishing feature of the place. " Lizzie, of what were you and Annie Keary talking so eagerly in the garden during the English speaking hour ?" was asked on one occasion by the head teacher in the school. Confusedly, yet with a slight impression of new and growing importance, the reply came from Lizzie, " Oh, madame ! Annie Keary was telling me all about gravitation and the stars." Very long faces all round, and " H'm, it's a pity, I think, that Miss Keary cannot find something more edifying to say...