As a moral agent, Matilda was reckless, headstrong, violent, and unamenable to reason. One proof of the deplorable state of her mind was, that from her father’s example she had learned to swear like a trooper. Her mother was greatly shocked at the “unlady-like trick,” and wondered “how she had picked it up.” “But you can soon break her of it, Miss Grey,” said she: “it is only a habit; and if you will just gently remind her every time she does so, I am sure she will soon lay it aside.” I not only “gently reminded” her, I tried to impress upon her how wrong it was, and how distressing to the ears of decent people: but all in vain: I was only answered by a careless laugh, and, “Oh, Miss Grey, how shocked you are! I’m so glad!” or, “Well! I can’t help it; papa shouldn’t have taught me: I learned it all from him; and maybe a bit from the coachman.” Her brother John, _alias_ Master Murray, was about eleven when I came: a fine, stout, healthy boy, frank and good-natured in the main, and might have been a decent lad had he been properly educated; but now he was as rough as a young bear, boisterous, unruly, unprincipled, untaught, unteachable—at least, for a governess under his mother’s eye. His masters at school might be able to manage him better—for to school he was sent, greatly to my relief, in the course of a year; in a state, it is true, of scandalous ignorance as to Latin, as well as the more useful though more neglected things: and this, doubtless, would all be laid to the account of his education having been entrusted to an ignorant female teacher, who had presumed to take in hand what she was wholly incompetent to perform. I was not delivered from his brother till full twelve months after, when he also was despatched in the same state of disgraceful ignorance as the former.