The Little Colonel at Boarding-School. Johnston Annie Fellows
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my name on this page long dwell,
In after years to recall
A schoolmate who wished you well."
When the girls read that, an autograph-album fever broke out in the school. Every one came to Betty for an acrostic. She spent all her playtime writing them. She ate all her meals struggling inwardly with the hard initials in such names as Pinkie, Ursula, and Vashti. She even dreamed rhymes in her sleep.
Lloyd copied music until her fingers ached, for everybody requested a verse of a Princess Winsome song. Kitty drew whole colonies of kittens, and Allison, finding it impossible to paint a flower typical of each name presented, took to painting a single forget-me-not above her name.
The teachers, too, suffered from the epidemic, and even people outside the school, until the principal found twenty-three letters in the mail-bag one morning, all addressed to a well-known writer of juvenile stories, whose books were the most popular in the school. An investigation proved that because one girl had received his autograph, twenty-three had followed her example in requesting it, and not one of them had enclosed a stamp; nor had it occurred to them that an author's time is too valuable to spend in answering questions, merely to satisfy the idle curiosity of his readers.
"One stamp is of little value," said the principal, "but multiply it by the hundreds he would have to use in a year in answering the letters of thoughtless strangers, who have no claim on him in any way." Twenty-three girls filed out into the hall after the principal's little talk that followed, and slipped their letters from the mail-bag. Ten of them threw theirs into the waste-basket. The others, who had asked no questions and were more desirous of obtaining their favourite author's autograph, opened theirs to enclose an envelope, stamped and addressed; but few more letters of the kind went out from Lloydsboro Seminary after that.
Kitty, Katie, Allison, Betty, and Lloyd all pounced upon Miss Edith one morning before school, each with an album in her hand. Miss Edith clutched her hair in mock despair. "These make the seventh dozen I have been asked to write in this week," she declared. "Life is too short to hunt up a different sentiment for each one. I must use the same verse for everybody."
The girls perched on the desks around the rostrum, as she spread out the books before her and began to write. They always loved the few moments they could snatch in Miss Edith's room before school, and felt that her autograph would be one of the most valuable in the collection.
"This is one of my favourite verses," said Miss Edith, as she passed the blotter over the last page, and read it aloud:
"This learned I from the shadow of a tree
That to and fro did sway upon the wall:
Our shadow-selves – our influence – may fall
Where we can never be."
"I want to tell you a little incident that fastened it in my memory. I have a friend teaching in one of the mountain schools of Kentucky, who told me of two girls who came to the door one day, asking to be admitted as students. Each carried a bundle of clothes wrapped in a newspaper. That was all they had – no money to pay their tuition, no way of paying their board unless they were allowed to work for it. They had walked forty miles to get to that school. Their home was twice the distance away, but their uncle, who was a tin pedlar, took them half-way in his wagon. They were a week on the road after they left him, where his route branched off from theirs. They stopped at night in some village or farmhouse to which he directed them.
"Nobody had the heart to tell them that there was no room for students who could not pay their way, neither could any one turn away such ambition. But the school was poor. It is kept up by donations from benevolent people, and it was only by great self-sacrifice that the teachers could take them at all.
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