‘Cobbett, if you don’t leave that malachite blotting book alone directly, I’ll ring for your pa,’ exclaimed the invalid, as Bella entered. Mr. Piper was a man who had read books in his time--not many, perhaps, but he remembered them all the better on that account. He was a man who boasted of thinking for himself; which meant that he asserted second-hand opinions so forcibly as to make them pass for new, and put down other people’s arguments with the high hand of a self-conscious capitalist. He had christened his two elder boys Cobbett and Bentham. The chubby little plague in pinafores was Horne Tooke, the bony boy in knickerbockers was Brougham. The two girls were living memorials of Elizabeth Fry and Mary Wolstencroft. His ambition was to see these children all educated up to the highest modern standard, and able to occupy an intellectual eminence from which they could look down upon everybody else. ‘Money and dulness are sometimes supposed to go hand in hand,’ said Mr. Piper. ‘I shall take care that my children may be able to exhibit the pleasing spectacle of capital allied with intelligence.’ Unhappily the young Pipers did not take to education quite so kindly as their father expected them to do. They had no thirst for the Pierian spring, and, instead of drinking deeply, imbibed the sacred waters in reluctant sips, as if the fount had been some nauseous sulphur spring offered to them medicinally. Poor Bella had laboured almost hopelessly for the last year to drag Brougham through that Slough of Despond, Dr. Somebody’s first Latin grammar, and had toiled valorously in the vain effort to familiarize Horne Tooke with words of one syllable. Elizabeth Fry, whom her mother designed for greatness in the musical world, had not yet mastered the mysteries of a common chord, or learned the difference between a major and minor scale. Mary Wolstencroft was a sullen young person of eleven, who put her chubby fingers in her mouth at the least provocation, and stubbornly refused to learn anything. ‘Oh, my dear, I am very glad you have come,’ cried Mrs. Piper. ‘These children are positively maddening. I like to have them with me, because it’s a mother’s duty, and I hope I shall do my duty to the last hour of my life. But they are very trying. Bentham has spilt the ink on the patchwork table-cover, and Mary has been pulling the Angola’s tail most cruelly.’ The animal which Mrs. Piper insisted on calling the ‘Angola’ was a magnificent white Angora cat, and really the handsomest living creature in the Piper household; indeed the Piper children seemed to have been invented as a foil to the grace and beauty of the cat, to which they were inferior in every attribute, except the gift of speech, a privilege they systematically abused. Bella examined the injured table-cover, and stroked the offended cat, and then sat down by Mrs. Piper’s sofa.