conversation. She always says exactly what she thinks, without
fear of the plain truth; yet no one is more tactful and adroit than
she in turning an unpleasant truth so that it will do the least
possible hurt to the feelings of others. Not all the attention that
has been paid her since she was a child has made her take herself
too seriously. Sometimes she gets started on a very solemn
preachment. Then her teacher calls her an incorrigible little
sermonizer, and she laughs at herself. Often, however, her
sober ideas are not to be laughed at, for her earnestness carries
her listeners with her. There is never the least false sententious-
ness in what she says. She means everything so thoroughly
that her very quotations, her echoes from what she has read,
are in truth original.

Her logic and her sympathy are in excellent balance. Her
sympathy is of the swift and ministering sort which, fortu-
nately, she has found so often in other people. And her sympa-
thies go further and shape her opinions on political and national
movements. She was intensely pro-Boer and wrote a strong
argument in favour of Boer independence. When she was told
of the surrender of the brave little people, her face clouded and
she was silent a few minutes. Then she asked clear, penetrat-
ing questions about the terms of the surrender, and began
to discuss them.

Both Mr. Gilman and Mr. Keith, the teachers who prepared
her for college, were struck by her power of constructive reason-
ing; and she was excellent in pure mathematics, though she
seems never to have enjoyed it much. Some of the best of her
writing, apart from her fanciful and imaginative work, is her
exposition in examinations and technical themes, and in some
letters which she found it necessary to write to clear up mis-
understandings, and which are models of close thinking enforced
with sweet vehemence.

She is an optimist and an idealist.

"I hope," she writes in a letter, "that L----- isn't too practical,
for if she is, I'm afraid she'll miss a great deal of pleasure."

In the diary that she kept at the Wright-Humason school
in New York she wrote on October 18, 1894, "I find that I
have four things to learn in my school life here, and indeed, in
life--to think clearly without hurry or confusion, to love every-
body sincerely, to act in everything with the highest motives,
and to trust in dear God unhesitatingly."

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