"They are all I have to look forward to," she wrote in self-defence.

"I shall never write to I---- M---- again," was another entry, but Mr.McLean found on the same page, "I have written to I---- M----, but do not intend posting it," and beneath that was, "God forgive me, I have posted it." The troubles with arithmetic were becoming more terrible.

"I am never _really_ sure about the decimals," she wrote.
A Professor of Memory had appeared at the Muckley, and Miss Ailie admits having given him half-a-crown to explain his system to her.

But when he was gone she could not remember whether you multiplied everything by ten before dividing by five and subtracting a hundred, or began by dividing and doing something underhand with the cube root.

Then Mr.Dishart, who had a microscope, wanted his boy to be taught science, and several experiments were described at length in the book, one of them dealing with a penny, _H_, and a piston, _X Y_, and you do things to the piston "and then the penny comes to the surface." "But it never does," Miss Ailie wrote sorrowfully; perhaps she was glad when Master Dishart was sent to another school.
"Though I teach the girls the pianoforte I find that I cannot stretch my fingers as I used to do.