"What did you do on them?" inquired the little girl.
"Will you listen to that?" demanded her mother. "Ten years old--and she asks what we did on examination days! This is what it means to belong to the rising generation--not to know, at ten, anything about examination days!"
"What _did_ you do on them?" the little girl persisted.
"We had examinations," I explained. "All our books were taken away, and we were given paper and pen and ink--"
"And three hours for each examination," my friend broke in. "We had one in the morning and another in the afternoon."
"Yes," I went on. "One morning we would have a grammar examination. Twenty questions would be written on the blackboard by our teacher, and we would write the answers--in three hours. On another morning, or on the afternoon of that same day, we might have an arithmetic examination. There would be twenty questions, and three hours to answer them in, just the same."
"Do you understand, dear?" said the little girl's mother. "Well, well," she went on, turning to me before the child could reply, "how this talk brings examination days back to my remembrance! What excitement there was! And how we worked getting ready for them! I really think it was a matter of pride with us to be so tired after our last examination of the week that we had to go to bed and dine on milk toast and a soft-boiled egg!"
The little girl was looking at us with round eyes.
"The going to bed does," she made reply; "and the milk toast and the egg for dinner, and the working hard. The examinations sound something like the tests we have, _They_ are questions to write answers to, but we don't think much about them. I don't believe any of the girls or boys go to bed afterwards, or have milk toast and eggs for dinner--on purpose because they have had a test!"
She was manifestly puzzled. "Perhaps it is because we have tests about every two weeks, and not just in January and June," she suggested.
She did not seem disposed to investigate further the subject of her mother's and my school-days. In a few moments she ran off to her play.
When she was quite out of hearing her mother burst into a hearty laugh. "Poor child!" she exclaimed. "She thinks we and our school were very curious. I wonder why," she continued more seriously, "we did take examinations, and lessons, too, so weightily. Children don't in these days. The school-days of the week are so full of holiday spirit for them that, actually, Saturday is not much of gala day. Think of what Saturday was to _us_! What glorious times we had! Why, Saturday was _Saturday_, to us! Do you remember the things we did? You wrote poems and I painted pictures, and we read stories, and 'acted' them. Then, we had our gardens in the spring, and our experiments in cake-baking in the winter. My girls do none of these things on Saturday. The day is not to them what it was to us. I wonder what makes the difference."