No sooner did the gate-bell announce the arrival of Miss Wewitz and her pupil, than the Frenchmen, who could just distinguish the bonnets of the ladies above the top of the boards before the railings, began whistling, and making that peculiar noise with the lips which is supposed to be especially agreeable to birds and babies. This was more than the discreet schoolmistress could tolerate; she thought all the eyes of all the mothers of Europe were directed towards Parthenon House at that moment; so, before the gate could be opened, she commenced shaking the end of her parasol between the railings with considerable violence at the Frenchmen, who appeared to be mightily taken with the mysterious lady’s menaces, for no sooner did they perceive the mystic parasol waggling about, apparently by itself, between the railings, than they—one and all—set up a loud roar of laughter, while the more they laughed, the more the parasol shook with rage—the one merely serving to increase the excitement of the other. Now, Miss Wewitz was a lady of almost Roman virtue. She was, or rather she _had been_, in the heyday of her youth, what little men delight to term a remarkably fine woman; that is to say, she stood so near the “regulation height,” and her upper lip was shaded with so delicate a _moustache_, that, in male attire, she would have found little difficulty in ’listing in the Life Guards, had she felt so inclined. She was, however, one of those ladies upon whom food is said to be thrown away; for, though she made a special point of taking the most nourishing things—little and good, and often, was her dietetic rule of life—still, eat as she would, her figure remained as long, as thin, and as angular at all the joints, as a Dutch doll. At an early age—as the lady herself delighted to tell her pupils—she had made a resolution never to marry, but to dedicate her life to study and her dear mother; for, soon after she had turned up her back hair, she formed so bad an opinion of the male sex, that not if Plutus himself, with all the gold that Lemprière tells he was possessed of, had come and thrown himself at her feet, would she have condescended to have become the partner of his handsome fortune. But, if Miss Wewitz was not exactly a Venus in her “outward woman,” (as she termed it,) at least she was very nearly a Minerva within; and, as if to label herself “a woman of mind,” she dressed in the approved costume of feminine genius. Her hair was turned back _à la Chinoise_, as if to stretch her forehead up as high as possible, and behind each ear there dangled a solitary ringlet, that a discarded cook had been heard to declare was “never her own.” And, to be candid, there certainly was an intensity in the blackness of Miss Wewitz’ raven tresses, coupled with a ruddy rustiness at the roots, that raised up before you a vivid picture of the lady’s head done up in cabbage-leaves once a month; while, as she smiled, and showed her front teeth, which