made rectors.  Ellen Marriott was going to be confirmed.  She was a short, fair, plump girl, with blue eyes and sandy hair, which was this morning arranged in taller cannon curls than usual, for the reception of the Episcopal benediction, and some of the young ladies thought her the prettiest girl in the school; but others gave the preference to her rival, Maria Gardner, who was much taller, and had a lovely ‘crop’ of dark-brown ringlets, and who, being also about to take upon herself the vows made in her name at her baptism, had oiled and twisted her ringlets with especial care.  As she seated herself at the breakfast-table before Miss Townley’s entrance to dispense the weak coffee, her crop excited so strong a sensation that Ellen Marriott was at length impelled to look at it, and to say with suppressed but bitter sarcasm, ’Is that Miss Gardner’s head?’ ‘Yes,’ said Maria, amiable and stuttering, and no match for Ellen in retort; ‘th—­th—­this is my head.’  ’Then I don’t admire it at all!’ was the crushing rejoinder of Ellen, followed by a murmur of approval among her friends.  Young ladies, I suppose, exhaust their sac of venom in this way at school.  That is the reason why they have such a harmless tooth for each other in after life.

The only other candidate for confirmation at Miss Townley’s was Mary Dunn, a draper’s daughter in Milby and a distant relation of the Miss Linnets.  Her pale lanky hair could never be coaxed into permanent curl, and this morning the heat had brought it down to its natural condition of lankiness earlier than usual.  But that was not what made her sit melancholy and apart at the lower end of the form.  Her parents were admirers of Mr. Tryan, and had been persuaded, by the Miss Linnets’ influence, to insist that their daughter should be prepared for confirmation by him, over and above the preparation given to Miss Townley’s pupils by Mr. Crewe.  Poor Mary Dunn!  I am afraid she thought it too heavy a price to pay for these spiritual advantages, to be excluded from every game at ball to be obliged to walk with none but little girls—­in fact, to be the object of an aversion that nothing short of an incessant supply of plumcakes would have neutralized.  And Mrs. Dunn was of opinion that plumcake was unwholesome.  The anti-Tryanite spirit, you perceive, was very strong at Miss Townley’s, imported probably by day scholars, as well as encouraged by the fact that that clever woman was herself strongly opposed to innovation, and remarked every Sunday that Mr. Crewe had preached an ‘excellent discourse’.  Poor Mary Dunn dreaded the moment when school-hours would be over, for then she was sure to be the butt of those very explicit remarks which, in young ladies’ as well as young gentlemen’s seminaries, constitute the most subtle and delicate form of the innuendo.  ‘I’d never be a Tryanite, would you?’ ’O here comes the lady that knows so much more about religion than we do!’ ’Some people think themselves so very pious!’