of plaiting her hair, seats her on her knee in the midst of her own peculiar set, and proceeds to extract, with very commendable ingenuity, all the events of the day, reserving to herself the liberty of drawing her own inferences from the detail, copious or meagre, as the case may be. One circumstance connected with the arrival of the young stranger does strike the privileged set with inexpressible astonishment. If, as is asserted, she came in a private carriage, and that carriage the veritable property of her friends, and not a 'trumpery glass-coach'--how, then, could she be going to sleep in the room over the kitchen?--that chamber of Blue-Beard reputation, strongly suspected of harbouring mice, and convicted, beyond question, of being subject to a very disagreeable odour! The thing is pronounced impossible, and unworthy a moment's credit. In vain the child assures them, upon her word and honour, she helped to put away her clothes; the proposition is not to be believed for an instant. The informant, indignant at having her veracity impeached, calls aloud on Miss Armstrong to verify her assertion. The appeal is, however, happily overpowered by a simultaneous shuffle of the feet of the inquisitors; she is quietly slided from the knee on which she had been sitting, and the discussion proceeds in the absence of the witness. There certainly is something very unusual attending the new-comer: no note of preparation announced her advent; no cheerful congratulations had been offered to themselves on the prospect of a new companion; no hopes expressed that they would do their best to make her home a pleasant one. And then the circumstance of her taking her _first_ tea in the eating-room, to which she was not even introduced; such a mark of contumely had never before been suffered within the memory of the oldest school-girl present; and of this fact they were themselves eye-witnesses. It was inexplicable: they could not understand it. A single hour, however, suffices to solve the mystery: the period at length arrives for preparing lessons, and with it the housemaid to curl the hair of the younger children; and in this labour of love Miss Armstrong is requested to lend her assistance! A glimmering light as to her real position flashes across the minds of the bewildered spectators. But when she is further required to attend the children to their respective rooms, and light the candles preparatory to the arrival of the elder girls, the matter is put beyond a doubt: she is--she must be--a half-boarder! Reader, picture to yourself, I beseech you, the estimation in which a Christian slave is held by a follower of the true Prophet, a Nazarene by a Jewish rabbi, a Pariah by a holy Brahmin of immaculate descent, and you may then have some faint, some very faint idea, of the depths to which this fact has sunk our heroine in the estimation of the major part of her schoolfellows!