Glancing into the sitting-room as she passed its partly opened door she discovered her grandfather asleep in his arm-chair and her grandmother sitting near him busy in slicing apples to be strung and hung up in the kitchen to dry!  With a shiver of foreboding the child passed the door on tiptoe; suppose her grandmother should call her in to string those apples!  The other children never strung them to suit her and she “admired” Marjorie’s way of doing them.  Marjorie said once that she hated apple blossoms because they turned into dried apples.  But that was when she had stuck the darning needle into her thumb.

I’m afraid you will think now that Marjorie is not as sweet as she used to be.

She presented the paper, congratulating herself upon her escape, and Miss Prudence lifted herself in the hammock and took the pencil, holding it in her fingers while she meditated.  What a little girl she was when her whiteheaded old teacher had bidden her write this sentence on the blackboard.  She wrote it carefully, Marjorie’s attentive eyes following each movement of the pencil.

“The persons inside the coach were Mr Miller a clergyman his son a lawyer Mr Angelo a foreigner his lady and a little child” In the entire sentence there was not one punctuation mark.

“Read it, please.”

Marjorie began to read, then stopped and laughed.

“I can’t.”

“You wouldn’t enjoy a book very much written in that style, would you?”

“I couldn’t enjoy it at all.  I wouldn’t read it”

“Well, if you can’t read it, explain it to me.  How many persons are in the coach?”

“That’s easy enough!  There’s Mr. Miller, that’s one; there’s the clergyman, that’s two!”

“Perhaps that is only one; Mr. Miller may be a clergyman.”

“So he may.  But how can I tell?” asked Marjorie, perplexed.  “Well, then, his son makes two.”

“Whose son?”

“Why, Mr. Miller’s!”

“Perhaps he was the clergyman’s son,” returned Miss Prudence seriously.

“Well, then,” declared Marjorie, “I guess there were eight people!  Mr. Miller, the clergyman, the son, the lawyer, Mr. Angelo, a foreigner, a lady, and a child!”

“Placing a comma after each there are eight persons,” said Miss Prudence making the commas.

“Yes,” assented Marjorie, watching her.

Beneath it Miss Prudence wrote the sentence again, punctuating thus: 

“The persons inside the conch were Mr. Miller, a clergyman; his son, a lawyer; Mr. Angelo, a foreigner, his lady; and a little child.”

“Now how many persons are there inside this coach?”

“Three gentlemen, a lady and child,” laughed Marjorie—­“five instead of eight.  Those little marks have caused three people to vanish.”

“And to change occupations.”

“Yes, for Mr. Miller is a clergyman, his son a lawyer, and Mr. Angelo has become a foreigner.”