“I don’t observe anything very wrong, Mrs. Crull.”

“Ha! ha! there you are flattering me, you little chick.  I know, or think, I have improved a good deal with our dear Miss Pillbody; but a smart little scholar like you must see lots of mistakes in me.”

At this point, Pet would blush, and murmur, “No—­no!”

“Humbug!” Mrs. Crull would say.  “I know my incurable faults, and I know that you know ’em.  But Lor’ bless you, child! there is plenty of ladies in good s’ciety” (Mrs. C. always slurred on the first syllable of that word) “who talk as bad as me.  Their husbands, just like mine, got rich suddenly, you see.  I tell you, I was ’stonished to find how many of ’em there was.  They are thicker’n blackberries.  I found out something else, too.”  Here Mrs. Crull would shake her head knowingly, like one who had discovered a great truth.

Pet would know what was coming, but would ask:  “Pray, what is it, Mrs. Crull?”

“Why, I found out that, if you give good dinners and big parties, and keep a carriage, and have a conservatory, and rent a pew up near the altar, your little shortcomin’s in grammar isn’t no objection to you.  ‘Money makes the mare go.’  However, eddication, as Miss Pillbody says, is a good thing of itself, and I shall keep on tryin’ to get it.”

These conversations always ended by an invitation to Pet to visit Mrs. Crull.  “I’ll have our carriage call for you,” she would say, “at your father’s house.  We have no children, you know, and the old man would be very good to you; though, of course, it wouldn’t do to hint about the school.  But I can trust my little friend for that.  Come, now, won’t you?”

But Pet always modestly declined these kind invitations.  She knew her father’s pride, and his aversion to the patronage of rich people.

CHAPTER II.

THE FALLING BOARD.

One afternoon, Pet had been taking an extra lesson from Miss Pillbody, and had started homeward with a light heart, humming to herself a musical exercise which she had practised for the first time that day.  A few doors from Miss Pillbody’s, some workmen were repairing a wooden awning.  The framework was covered with loose boards, which the carpenters were about to nail down.  A feminine dread of danger would have induced Pet to make a wide detour of this awning; but her mind was so fully occupied by the musical exercise, that she walked, unheeding, right under it.

“Look out! look out!” shrieked a chorus of voices overhead, accompanied by a rattle of falling boards.  Pet sprang forward just in time to escape one of them, and to catch another on her shoulder.  It touched her gently, not even abrading her skin, for its fall had been stopped midway by a young man.

“Stupid!” “Silly creature!” “The girl’s a blockhead!” “Where’s her eyes, I wonder?” shouted the carpenters, after the manner of carmen and stage drivers, when you narrowly escape being run over by their carelessness, at the crossings.