REVOLT. I do not know how long my martyrdom in the town house had endured before I resolved to make an end of it myself. Nor do I yet quite understand how the scene that led to an excess of misery so terminated began. I had been more contented that day than usual. The nurse had let me sit by the nursery fire while she bathed and dressed the latest addition to our family circle, a baby boy with a pink wrinkled face. Compared with that gurgling morsel of humanity, I felt very wise and old indeed. After that the nursemaid came and took me on her knee, and while perched there she sang me a song. I slept in the next room, and was not often allowed into the nursery, or I am sure the nurse and nursemaid would have made life easier for me. Then I wandered into the play-room, and here great doings were afoot. They were getting up a transformation scene. On the top of each ladder a little girl sat, representing a fairy, and in the middle of the room a small child lay with a white cloth about her. When somebody clapped hands she sprang up, caught her skirts in either hand, and began to dance as she had seen the fairies in the pantomime. They were all in high spirits that day, and let me look on without snubbing or laughing at me. Like all creatures unaccustomed to much mercy, this small favour filled me with joy, and I expanded upon a whiff of social equality. Children resemble dogs in their dislike of intruders, and to these young people I daresay I, with my sulky miserable face, pale and woe-be-gone from association with sorrow and from unassuaged longing for other days, was an unattractive enough intruder. One there was who always resented my appearance in their midst more than the rest, my mother's favourite, the five-year-old queen of the establishment. My mother used to call her queen, and tell her that she was at liberty to do what she liked to me, as I was only a slave. What a surprising amount of good must lie at the bottom of a nature so trained, that it ever developed into good-natured and generous womanhood! But to expect that the child in those days should have been other than a little vixen to me, would be to expect the impossible. The play was interrupted for dinner, and after dinner the troop marched up again to the play-room to resume their game. I stayed down-stairs, and stole into the storeroom to talk to Mrs. Clement. Near tea-hour she sent me on some message, and that, of course, was a proud moment for me. Children love to be sent on messages between their elders. They instantly become as inflated as a general's aide-de-camp, and hardly need a horse in imagination to place them in their own esteem above the level of other children.