“Barnum’s elephants couldn’t have pulled it away from me,” Ella declared stoutly. She had just been to Barnum’s circus, so of course she knew that whereof she spoke.
This was a school for “Young Ladies.” Ella did so wish that there was just one little girl among the pupils. However, she was used to being with older girls, and she was soon quite at home among these. Her studies were arithmetic, which she liked, and French and music, which she did not like.
“Why do you like arithmetic best?” the mother once asked.
“Because,” replied Ella thoughtfully, “when it’s done, it’s done, and I know it’s done, and it can’t come undone. In music, even if I have practiced my very best, I may strike some wrong note and spoil it all; and in French, I may forget just one word for just one minute, and then the whole sentence isn’t good for anything at all. Arithmetic is easy. It’s just add, subtract, multiply, and divide; and then you know it all. The rest is only different ways of using these things. A baby ought to know how to learn four things.”
These were what Ella called her real “studies”; but there were two others that she called her “make-believe studies.” These latter she had chosen herself according to the color of the covers of the textbook and the size of the print. The tiny geography was yellow, with coarse print, and easy questions. The little grammar had a bright pink cover. It was not much larger than her own hand, and it was so clear and easy that Ella felt almost as if she had written it herself. Who could help understanding when an illustration was “George had four sweet apples,” or “William’s dog has come home”? Of course, like all productions of grown-ups, it had occasional lapses, such as, “The gay summer droops into pallid autumn,” which of course no child ought to be expected to understand.
These two books were so winning that Ella took great pleasure in saying every day or two, “I have learned my geography lesson,” or “I have finished my grammar. May I recite it now?” There was another reason, which she did not realize, but which was a strong one. She knew that little girls in the public schools did not study French and did study geography and grammar; and she was beginning to want to do things just like other girls.
Ella had one great advantage over most little girls, and this was in her mother’s belief that if a child wanted to do what older people were doing, she ought to have a chance to try. “She will learn something,” the busy mother always said, “and whatever she learns will come in play some time.” That was why, when the mother and her friend were making wax flowers, Ella was encouraged to see what she could do. She had really acquired considerable skill. These ornaments were as fashionable as ever, and the other “young ladies” were so glad to follow her instructions that she began to feel quite like an assistant teacher.
She used her skill in making a bouquet for her special little girl friend at the old home, the one who had sent her the “jockey cap” at Christmas. Such a bouquet as it was! Ella wrote in her diary, “There were in it one Moss-rose bud a spiderworth a jonquil, some lily’s of the valley and a bunch of coral Honeysuckle two Prickly pears some forgetmenots a bunch of Verbena’s and two Orange-blossoms with two Hawthorn’s and some grass with two Sweet peas were the contents of my bouquet.” It is little wonder that they did not dwell together in unity and that some of them were broken when the time of unpacking arrived.
Ella also gave reading lessons. The mother had become interested in her washerwoman, a negress who had once been a slave. The woman was eager to learn, and Ella used to stop three times a week on her way home from school to hear her read and, incidentally, to study the little granddaughter and wonder if there was not some way to make her hair straight and her face white.
Ella was usually a very happy little girl, but one day, in pessimistic mood she wrote in her little diary, in as large letters as the narrow space between the lines would permit, “I wish I did not have to do anything but read and play all day long”; but certainly she did a rather large amount of both reading and playing.