Bella, who had gone away at first, dancing to the door, pleased to be released from her confinement, came back to see Mary Bell’s picture, while her mother was examining it.  She seemed very much pleased with it indeed.  Then she asked her mother to look at her letters upon the board.  Mary Erskine and Mary Bell both looked at them, one by one, very attentively, and compared them with the letters which Mary Bell had made for patterns, and also with specimens of the letters in the books.  Bella took great interest in looking for the letters in the book, much pleased to find that she knew them wherever she saw them.  Her mother, too, learned a and b very effectually by this examination of Bella’s work.  Mary Erskine selected the two best letters which Bella had made, one of each kind, and rubbed out all the rest with a cloth.  She then put up the board in a conspicuous place upon a shelf, where the two good letters could be seen by all in the room.  Bella was much pleased at this, and she came in from her play several times in the course of the day, to look at her letters and to call them by name.

When Bella’s board had thus been put up in its conspicuous position, Mary Bell sat down to finish her drawing, while Bella went out to pick up her two baskets of chips.  Mary Bell worked upon her house for nearly the whole of another half hour.  When it was finished she cut the part of the paper which it was drawn upon off from the rest, and ruled around it a neat margin of double black lines.  She obtained a narrow strip of wood, from the shop which served her as a ruler.  She said that she meant to have all her drawing lessons of the same size, and to put the same margin around them.  She marked her house No. 1, writing the numbering in a small but plain hand on one corner.  She wrote the initials of her, name, M.B., in the same small hand, on the opposite corner.

Mary Erskine did not attempt her lesson until the evening.  She finished her work about the house a little after eight o’clock, and then she undressed the children and put them to bed.  By this time it was nearly nine o’clock.  The day had been warm and pleasant, but the nights at this season were cool, and Mary Erskine put two or three dry sticks upon the fire, before she commenced her work, partly for the warmth, and partly for the cheerfulness of the blaze.

She lighted her lamp, and sat down at her work-table, with Mary Bell’s copy, and her pen, ink, and paper, before her.  The copy had been pinned up in sight all the day, and she had very often examined it, when passing it, in going to and fro at her work.  She had thus learned the names of all the letters in the word Mary, and had made herself considerably familiar with the forms of them; so that she not only knew exactly what she had to do in writing the letters, but she felt a strong interest in doing it.  She, however, made extremely awkward work in her first attempts at writing the letters.  She, nevertheless,