"MY DERE EVRYDAY MAMA,--i dont like skule a bit. i cant du wat i like. i dont have enuf tu et. Nun of us have enuf tu et. We had enuf at crismas when everyboddy sent us lots of things. We were very glad i had luvly things it wos so nice but i dont like skule, its horid, theres a horid boy here. i bet him when he called me a savage. Sister Esmeralda said it first i dont like her. She teches me. tell Mary Jane to give my black dog 6 kisses. i want to go home i like yu and Louis and Mary Jane and Bessy the apel woman i want to clim tres like Johny Burke your affecshunat little girl. ANGELA." When this frank outpouring was subjected to revision, it ran:-- "MY DEAR FOSTER-MAMMA,--I am very happy here with the dear nuns. I hope I shall remain with them a long while. We have such fun always. We learn ever so many nice things. We love our dear mistress, Sister Esmeralda. Reverend Mother had a cold, and we all prayed so hard for her, and now she is better. I want some money for her feast-day. We are going to give her a nice present. We had a play and a tea-party. Lady Wilhelmina Osborne's little girl came over from the Abbey. I hope you are quite well. With love, your affectionate ANGELA." All our mistresses were not like Sister Esmeralda, a Spanish inquisitor in a shape of insidious charm, nor a burly brute like the lay-sister, who had so piously welted my naked back, nor a chill and frozen despot like the pallid superioress. Mother Aloysius was, of course, a far-off stained-glass vision, a superlative rapture in devotion, not suitable for daily wear,--a recompense after the prolonged austerities of virtue and self-denial, a soaring acquaintance with ecstatic admiration. But on a lower plane there were some younger nuns we found tolerable and sympathetic. There was Sister Anne, who taught us to play at snowballs, and took a ball on her nose with companionable humour in the midst of our shrieking approbation. There was Sister Ignatius, who inspired us with terpsichorean ambition by dancing a polka with one of the big girls down the long study hall, to the amiable murmur of-- "Can you dance a polka? Yes, I can. Up and down the room with a nice young man"; or upon a more imaginative flight-- "My mother said that I never should Play with the gypsies in the wood; If I did, she would say, Naughty girl to disobey." Her great feat was, however, the Varsovienne, which she told us was a Polish dance, and that Poland was a bleak and unfortunate country on the confines of Russia. Ever afterwards I associated the sprightly Sister Ignatius with a polar bear, especially when I watched her dance the "Varsovienne," and fling her head over her shoulders in a most laughable way, just as I imagined a bear would do if he took to dancing the dance of Poland.