'Do not strive to grasp them all,'—period."
dictated Miriam to a group of girls in the school-room, who were "cramming" for the February examination, and who had hurried back at dinner time for that purpose.
"What a queer jumble that makes!" said Winnie. "I believe I'd rather copy it from the book. Don't you think that last line's odd?—'Do not strive to grasp them all.' I thought that was just what we ought to do, isn't it?"
"I asked Miss Brownlow that question yesterday," said Ernestine Alroy, a tall, pale and thoughtful-looking girl, "and she said that Miss Procter didn't mean that we were to let any of them go, but that we are not to try to seize them all at once; that it would be like anything else—if our hands were too full, we'd be sure to drop something. She said we must take this 'Memory Gem' in connection with the motto on the board, 'Do the duty that lies nearest thee,' and that if we followed the advice in both of them, we'd be sure not to let any of our duties go undone."
"Ernestine, you always did like to preach," said Josie Thompson, making a wry face over the pickle she was eating. "I think it's quite bad enough to have to learn Memory Gems, with all the hideous punctuation, and expect to stand an examination—and they always pick out the one you know the least about—with five per cent. off for a comma left out or put in the wrong place, ten for a misspelled word, and so on until, by the time my 'Gems' are corrected, there's no per cent. left at all. I say all this is bad enough, without having to understand and explain them." And she stopped to take breath, quite exhausted by her long speech.
"Perhaps, if you troubled yourself a little more about the meaning, you'd get higher marks occasionally," said Miriam.
"Oh, who cares for marks anyhow? I'm getting sick of the eternal word 'Duty!' Miss Brownlow never misses an occasion to make use of it. Then we're always learning some selection with the same word in it, and now you girls have taken it up and there's no knowing if you will ever stop. As for me, I'm going to enjoy myself while I'm young. I guess I'll live just as long, if I don't worry myself to death."
The brighter girls laughed, and Miriam said, with quick mimicry, "I think you will live just as long, if you don't worry yourself to death. What a speech! Well, I think you're right; you'll live forever, if worry is the only thing that can kill."
"Well, laugh as much as you please; you can all plod along, if you want to. I'm going to have a good time."
"It is hard, though," said Winnie, plaintively; "it's much nicer to do the things we like to do than those we ought to do, especially when none of us want to do things that are very wrong."