To me it is impossible to recall the leafy lanes, rose-scented; the narrow pavements and sleepy little shops; the great pageant, when the town's legend became for thrilled infants an afternoon of fugitive and barbaric splendour,--without evoking vague scenes from history, and marshalling before the mind's eye brilliant and memorable figures. Dull enough, I have no doubt, for those outside the convent walls, who had to live its dull life: no discord between the outlying farmsteads and the scarcely competitive shops; the time of day not too eagerly noted, in spite of the fame of its watches; and the vociferations of the newsvendors a thing unknown. But sectarian spirit ran pretty high, if I remember rightly, and Lysterby was represented in Parliament by a fierce anti-Catholic, whose dream, we imagined, it was to hang all Jesuits and deport the nuns. His name was whispered within the convent walls in awed undertones, as a pagan persecutor may have been spoken of in the Catacombs by the early Christians. But except the veiled ladies, romantically conscious of the proximity of persecution, with the joy of a name to pronounce in shuddering alarm, all Lysterby was at peace, and free to go to bed with the lambs, with nothing to disturb it in its morning dreams less melodious than the lark's song. Private wars were of the usual anodyne and eternal character: Smith the baker not on speaking terms with Jones the butcher; Grubb the weaver, in embittered monotony of conviction, supported on unlimited quantities of beer, ready to assert every evening that Collins the miller, who lived on the other side of the common, was a scoundrel. Of the troubles outside we little ones had no time to think. Our troubles within were abundant and absorbing, and no less absorbing and abundant were our small joys. There were ten of us only--ten queer, curious little girls; and one ragged specimen of the trousered sex--a horrid small boy, the scion of a distinguished house, whom the ladies of Mercy kept, long past the time, quaintly apparelled in black frocks and white pinafores, as an injudicious concession to claustral modesty. A boy of eight in skirts, with long brown curls upon his shoulders! To suit his raiment, nature made him the greatest little coward and minx of the lot of us. Beside him I felt myself a brave, a gentleman, a hero of adventure. He had all the vices I intuitively abhorred. He was spiteful, a tell-tale, an ignoble whiner; and before I was a month at the Ivies I was for him "that nasty little Irish girl," whose fine furies terrified the wits out of his mean little body, whose frank boxes on a rascally small ear sent him into floods of tears, and whose masterly system of open persecution kept him ever in alarm, ever on the race to Sister This or Mother That. How we loathed that boy Frank!