“Hello, Betsy, you’re just in time.  I’ve saved out a cupful of hot syrup for you, all ready to wax.”

Betsy hardly heard this, although she had been wild about waxed sugar on snow ever since her very first taste of it.  “Cousin Ann,” she said unhappily, “the Superintendent visited our school this afternoon.”

“Did he!” said Cousin Ann, dipping a thermometer into the boiling syrup.

“Yes, and we had examinations!” said Betsy.

“Did you?” said Cousin Ann, holding the thermometer up to the light and looking at it.

“And you know how perfectly awful examinations make you feel,” said Betsy, very near to tears again.

“Why, no,” said Cousin Ann, sorting over syrup tins.  “They never made me feel awful.  I thought they were sort of fun.”

“Fun!” cried Betsy, indignantly, staring through the beginnings of her tears.

“Why, yes.  Like taking a dare, don’t you know.  Somebody stumps you to jump off the hitching-post, and you do it to show ’em.  I always used to think examinations were like that.  Somebody stumps you to spell ‘pneumonia,’ and you do it to show ’em.  Here’s your cup of syrup.  You’d better go right out and wax it while it’s hot.”

Elizabeth Ann automatically took the cup in her hand, but she did not look at it.  “But supposing you get so scared you can’t spell ‘pneumonia’ or anything else!” she said feelingly.  “That’s what happened to me.  You know how your mouth gets all dry and your knees ...”  She stopped.  Cousin Ann had said she did not know all about those things.  “Well, anyhow, I got so scared I could hardly stand up!  And I made the most awful mistakes—­things I know just as well!  I spelled ‘doubt’ without any b and ‘separate’ with an e, and I said Iowa was bounded on the north by Wisconsin, and I ...”

“Oh, well,” said Cousin Ann, “it doesn’t matter if you really know the right answers, does it?  That’s the important thing.”

This was an idea which had never in all her life entered Betsy’s brain and she did not take it in at all now.  She only shook her head miserably and went on in a doleful tone.  “And I said 13 and 8 are 22! and I wrote March without any capital M, and I ...”

“Look here, Betsy, do you want to tell me all this?” Cousin Ann spoke in the quick, ringing voice she had once in a while which made everybody, from old Shep up, open his eyes and get his wits about him.  Betsy gathered hers and thought hard; and she came to an unexpected conclusion.  No, she didn’t really want to tell Cousin Ann all about it.  Why was she doing it?  Because she thought that was the thing to do.  “Because if you don’t really want to,” went on Cousin Ann, “I don’t see that it’s doing anybody any good.  I guess Hemlock Mountain will stand right there just the same even if you did forget to put a b in ‘doubt.’  And your syrup will be too cool to wax right if you don’t take it out pretty soon.”