A PUZZLING RESEMBLANCE

“Oakdale won’t seem like the same place.  What shall we do without you?” exclaimed Grace Harlowe mournfully.

It was a sunny afternoon in early October, and Grace Harlowe with her three chums, Anne Pierson, Nora O’Malley and Jessica Bright, stood grouped around three young men on the station platform at Oakdale.  For Hippy Wingate, Reddy Brooks and David Nesbit were leaving that afternoon to begin a four years’ course in an eastern college, and a number of relatives and friends had gathered to wish them godspeed.

Those who have read “Grace Harlowe’s plebe year at high school” need no introduction to these three young men or to the girl chums.  The doings of these merry girls made the record of their freshman year memorable indeed.  The winning of the freshman prize by Anne Pierson, despite the determined opposition and plotting of Miriam Nesbit, also aspiring to that honor, Mrs. Gray’s Christmas party, the winter picnic that ended in an adventure with wolves, and many other stirring events furnished plenty of excitement for the readers of that volume.

In “Grace Harlowe’s sophomore year at high school” the interest of the story was centered around the series of basketball games played by the sophomore and junior classes for the High School championship.  In this volume was narrated the efforts of Miriam Nesbit, aided by Julia Crosby, the disagreeable junior captain, to discredit Anne, and force Grace to resign the captaincy of her team.  The rescue of Julia by Grace from drowning during a skating party served to bring about a reconciliation between the two girls and clear Anne’s name of the suspicion resting upon it.  The two classes, formerly at sword’s points, became friendly, and buried the hatchet, although Miriam Nesbit, still bitterly jealous of Grace’s popularity, planned a revenge upon Grace that nearly resulted in making her miss playing on her team during the deciding game.  Grace’s encounter with an escaped lunatic, David Nesbit’s trial flight in his aeroplane, were incidents that also held the undivided attention of the reader.

In “Grace Harlowe’s junior year at high school” the four chums appeared as members of the famous sorority, the “Phi Sigma Tau,” organized by Grace for the purpose of helping needy High School girls.

In that volume Eleanor Savell, the self-willed, temperamental daughter of an Italian violin virtuoso, furnished much of the interest of the book.  The efforts of Grace and her chums to create in this girl a healthy, wholesome enjoyment for High School life, and her repudiation of their friendship, and subsequent attempts to revenge herself for fancied slights and insults, served to make the story absorbing.

The walking expedition through Upton Wood, the rescue of Mabel Allison, an orphan, by the Phi Sigma Tau, from the tender mercies of a cruel and ignorant woman with whom she lived, proved interesting reading.