You see, something perfectly dreadful had happened in school that day.  The Superintendent, the all-important, seldom-seen Superintendent, came to visit the school and the children were given some examinations so he could see how they were getting on.

Now, you know what an examination did to Elizabeth Ann.  Or haven’t I told you yet?

Well, if I haven’t, it’s because words fail me.  If there is anything horrid that an examination DIDn’t do to Elizabeth Ann, I have yet to hear of it.  It began years ago, before ever she went to school, when she heard Aunt Frances talking about how she had dreaded examinations when she was a child, and how they dried up her mouth and made her ears ring and her head ache and her knees get all weak and her mind a perfect blank, so that she didn’t know what two and two made.  Of course Elizabeth Ann didn’t feel all those things right off at her first examination, but by the time she had had several and had rushed to tell Aunt Frances about how awful they were and the two of them had sympathized with one another and compared symptoms and then wept about her resulting low marks, why, she not only had all the symptoms Aunt Frances had ever had, but a good many more of her own invention.

Well, she had had them all and had them hard this afternoon, when the Superintendent was there.  Her mouth had gone dry and her knees had shaken and her elbows had felt as though they had no more bones in them than so much jelly, and her eyes had smarted, and oh, what answers she had made!  That dreadful tight panic had clutched at her throat whenever the Superintendent had looked at her, and she had disgraced herself ten times over.  She went hot and cold to think of it, and felt quite sick with hurt vanity.  She who did so well every day and was so much looked up to by her classmates, what must they be thinking of her!  To tell the truth, she had been crying as she walked along through the woods, because she was so sorry for herself.  Her eyes were all red still, and her throat sore from the big lump in it.

And now she would live it all over again as she told the Putney cousins.  For of course they must be told.  She had always told Aunt Frances everything that happened in school.  It happened that Aunt Abigail had been taking a nap when she got home from school, and so she had come out to the sap-house, where Cousin Ann and Uncle Henry were making syrup, to have it over with as soon as possible.  She went up to the little slab house now, dragging her feet and hanging her head, and opened the door.

Cousin Ann, in a very short old skirt and a man’s coat and high rubber boots, was just poking some more wood into the big fire which blazed furiously under the broad, flat pan where the sap was boiling.  The rough, brown hut was filled with white steam and that sweetest of all odors, hot maple syrup.  Cousin Ann turned her head, her face very red with the heat of the fire, and nodded at the child.