At ten o'clock her paper was covered with what she thought were miserable scrawls, and her wrist and her fingers ached excessively.

She put her work away, and prepared to go to bed.
"Perhaps I shall have to give it up after all," said she.

"But I will not give up till I am beaten.

I will write an hour every day for six months, and then if I can not write my name so that people can read it, I will stop." The next day about an hour after breakfast Mary Erskine had another school for the children.

Bella took the two next letters _c_ and _d_ for her lesson, while Mary Bell took the swing hanging from the branch of the tree in the picture-book, for the subject of her second drawing.