Lutetia | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Sep 28, 1882

Lutetia.

Such a flutter as the boys and girls of Mr. Prescott's class were in! They had been given what they called a riddle, and as yet not one of them had guessed it. It was simply a word, about which they were each to write a paper to be read at the Wednesday exercises. The word was "Lutetia." Not one of the thirteen knew what it meant.

"It is a girl's name!" Alice said, tossing back her curls. "I suppose she was some old queen or princess, who wore millions of dollars' worth of diamonds, and let her subjects starve."

But the others exclaimed against this. It wasn't spelled right for the name of a woman. Fanny Lewis was sure of this, for her own grandmother's name was Letitia. Who should know better than she how to spell it?

So they wondered, and argued, and looked in the dictionary in vain, and groaned over Mr. Prescott's rule that none of them should ask their elders.

"How are we to know things if we can't ask our fathers and mothers, or our big brothers home from College?" Kate Briggs wondered.

"Books are the fellows to ask," said Stevie Brooks. So they asked all the books they could think of that would be likely to know, and learned nothing. Wednesday morning came, and the class were ready—for fun. Every one of them had made up a story about "Lutetia," and put it on paper; and each of them meant to declare that to the best of their knowledge it was the original story. One had made her a queen; another a nun; another a wonderful old grandmother; another a Gypsy fortune-teller.

Nora Williams, the youngest girl in the class, and, if it must be confessed, the most unpopular (I don't know for what reason, unless because she wore faded, ill-fitting clothes, and thick boots), had been out of school for a week, and only appeared again on Wednesday. Somebody asked her if she had her paper ready for the afternoon.

Yes, she said she met Mr. Prescott on the street, and he told her the subject, but she hadn't more than a dozen lines; she hadn't had time to study it out. Nobody was intimate enough with her to ask what she had found to study, so they contented themselves with giggling, and wondered what her dozen lines were about. It so happened that her name was the last one called, and she sat in wide-eyed wonder while the rest of her class read their queer, made-up stories, written as though they were true.

"Mine isn't at all like the others," she said doubtfully to Mr. Prescott, as she went to the platform, "it's just the truth."

Then she read simply a statement that "Lutetia" was just a huddle of mud huts, and nobody knew it was going to be wonderful. Then she told a little bit about the city after it received its new name; how the river Seine wound around and made two little islands, named "La Cite" and "St. Louis;" and that it was on the St. Louis side that the poor little forgotten Lutetia set up its mud huts. Then she said just a word or two about the wonderful "Hotel des Invalides," built for poor and wounded soldiers, and large enough to hold eight thousand of them at a time. Only a very little did Nora know about Lutetia, it is true, nor about Paris either, for that matter; but the beauty of it was, as Mr. Prescott said, that little was the truth, and could be added to whenever Nora had a chance to learn more.

"How in the world did she find it out?" wondered the rest when they met to talk it over. They decided to ask her.

"Why," she said, "mother sent me on an errand to Dr. Carter's, and I waited in the library while the doctor wrote a note for me to leave at the office, and I saw an encyclopedia there, and I happened to open it at Paris, and I happened to see the name "Lutetia." and there I found all I know." Nora was still a few minutes, and then, with her eyes very bright, said:—

"I don't know whether I ought to say the rest or not; but I don't know as it is quite right to say it all happened. I didn't know what to write, and I had no books to help me, so I prayed about it every night and morning, and I think maybe God let the encyclopedia open to just that place."

Some of the boys laughed, and one of them whistled, and another said, "You're a queer chick!" But some way, they all liked Nora better after that.—The Pansy.