_MAINE TO THE RESCUE_


"Oh, dear! oh, dear! It's snowing!"

"Hurrah! hurrah! It's snowing!"

Massachusetts looked up from her algebra. She was the head of the
school. She was rosy and placid as the apple she was generally
eating when not in class. Apples and algebra were the things she
cared most about in school life.

"Whence come these varying cries?" she said, taking her feet off the
fender and trying to be interested, though her thoughts went on with
"a 1/6 b =" etc.

"Oh, Virginia is grumbling because it is snowing, and Maine is
feeling happy over it, that's all!" said Rhode Island, the smallest
girl in Miss Wayland's school.

"Poor Virginia! It is rather hard on you to have snow in March, when
you have just got your box of spring clothes from home."

"It is atrocious!" said Virginia, a tall, graceful, languishing girl.
"How could they send me to such a place, where it is winter all the
spring? Why, at home the violets are in blossom, the trees are coming
out, the birds singing--"