“A big dog bite him.”

That afternoon, the teacher, on her way to see the bitten Pat, beheld him up an alley busily engaged in keeping five tops spinning at one time, while several American boys stood around, loudly admiring the Chinese feat.

The next morning Pat received five strokes from a cane which Miss Harrison kept within her desk and used only on special occasions. These strokes made Pat’s right hand tingle smartly; but he received them with smiling grace.

Miss Harrison then turned to five year old Pan, who had watched the caning with tearful interest.

“Pan!” said the teacher, “you have been just as naughty as Pat, and you must be punished too.”

“I not stay away flom school!” protested Pan.

“No,”—severely—“you did not stay away from school; but you told me a dog had bitten Pat, and that was not true. Little girls must not say what is not true. Teacher does not like to slap Pan’s hands, but she must do it, so that Pan will remember that she must not say what is not true. Come here!”

Pan, hiding her face in her sleeve, sobbingly arose.

The teacher leaned forward and pulling down the uplifted arm, took the small hand in her own and slapped it. She was about to do this a second time when Pat bounded from his seat, pushed Pan aside, and shaking his little fist in the teacher’s face, dared her in a voice hoarse with passion:

“You hurt my Pan again! You hurt my Pan again!”

They were not always lovers—those two. It was aggravating to Pat, when the teacher finding he did not know his verse, would turn to Pan and say:

“Well, Pan, let us hear you.”

And Pan, who was the youngest child in school and unusually small for her years, would pharisaically clasp her tiny fingers and repeat word for word the verse desired to be heard.

“I hate you, Pan!” muttered Pat on one such occasion.

Happily Pan did not hear him. She was serenely singing:

“Yesu love me, t’is I know,

For the Bible tell me so.”

But though a little seraph in the matter of singing hymns and repeating verses, Pan, for a small Chinese girl, was very mischievous. Indeed, she was the originator of most of the mischief which Pat carried out with such spirit. Nevertheless, when Pat got into trouble, Pan, though sympathetic, always had a lecture for him. “Too bad, too bad! Why not you be good like me?” admonished she one day when he was suffering “consequences.”

Pat looked down upon her with wrathful eyes.

“Why,” he asked, “is bad people always so good?”