school-girl, and through the open door entered the silent school-room and
sat down in the self-same seats in which two maidens, so unlike them, yet
linked to them by so strangely tender a tie, had reigned as school-room
belles nearly half a century before. In hushed voices, with moist eyes;
and faces shining with the light of other days, those grey-haired women
talked together of the scenes which that homely old room had witnessed,
the long-silent laughter, and the voices, no more heard on earth, with
which it had once echoed.

There in the corner stood a great wrought-iron stove, the counterpart of
the one around whose red-hot sides they had shivered, in their short
dresses, on cold winter mornings. On the walls hung the quaint maps of
that period whence they had received geographical impressions, strangely
antiquated now. Along one side of the room ran a black-board, on which
they had been wont to demonstrate their ignorance of algebra and geometry
to the complete satisfaction of the master, while behind them as they sat
was a row of recitation benches, associated with so many a trying ordeal
of school-girl existence.

"Do you ever think where the girls are in whose seats we are sitting?"
said Mrs. Slater, musingly. "I can remember myself as a girl, more or
less distinctly, and can even be sentimental about her; but it doesn't
seem to me that I am the same person at all; I can't realize it."

"Of course you can't realize it. Why should you expect to realize what is
not true?" replied Miss Ludington.

"But I am the same person," responded Mrs. Slater.

Miss Ludington regarded her with a smile.