shall come across it in time. They seem to have invented everything
except a steamer that won't go up and down as well as across.

* * * * *

I never could understand about averages. I can't think why people are so
fond of taking them,--men generally. It seems to me they tell anything
but the truth. They try to tell what happens every evening, and they
don't tell one evening right.

There was our Free Evening Cooking-school. We had a class of fourteen
girls; and they admired it, and liked nothing better, and attended
regularly. But Ann Maria made out the report according to the average of
attendance on the whole number of nights in the ten weeks of the school,
one evening a week; so she gave the numbers 12-3/5 each night.

Now the fact was, they all came every night except one, when there was
such a storm, nobody went,--not even the teacher, nor Ann Maria, nor any
of us. It snowed and it hailed and the wind blew, and our steps were so
slippery Amanda could not go out to put on ashes; ice even on the upper
steps. The janitor, who makes the fire, set out to go; but she was blown
across the street, into the gutter. She did succeed in getting in to Ann
Maria's, who said it was foolish to attempt it, and that nobody would
go; and I am not sure but she spent the night there,--at Ann Maria's, I
mean. Still, Ann Maria had to make up the account of the number of
evenings of the whole course.

But it looks, in the report, as though there were never the whole
fourteen there, and as though 1-2/5 of a girl stayed away every night,
when the facts are we did not have a single absence, and the whole