"Far from it," replied Mr. Stanley. "I am a gardener you know, and accustomed to study the genius of the soil before I plant. Most of my daughters, like the daughters of other men, have some one talent, or at least propensity; for parents are too apt to mistake inclination for genius. This propensity I endeavor to find out and to cultivate. But if I find the natural bias very strong, and not very safe, I then labor to counteract, instead of encouraging the tendency, and try to give it a fresh direction. Lucilla having a strong bent to whatever relates to intellectual taste, I have read over with her the most unexceptionable parts of a few of the best Roman classics. She began at nine years old, for I have remarked that it is not learning much, but learning late, which makes pedants. "Ph[oe]be, who has a superabundance of vivacity, I have in some measure tamed, by making her not only a complete mistress of arithmetic, but by giving her a tincture of mathematics. Nothing puts such a bridle on the fancy as demonstration. A habit of computing steadies the mind, and subdues the soarings of imagination. It sobers the vagaries of trope and figure, substitutes truth for metaphor, and exactness for amplification. This girl, who if she had been fed on poetry and works of imagination, might have become a Miss Sparkes, now rather gives herself the airs of a calculator and of a grave computist. Though as in the case of the cat in the fable, who was metamorphosed into a lady, nature will breath out as soon as the scratching of a mouse is heard; and all Ph[oe]be's philosophy can scarcely keep her in order, if any work of fancy comes in her way. "To soften the horrors of her fate, however, I allowed her to read a few of the best things in her favorite class. When I read to her the more delicate parts of Gulliver's Travels, with which she was enchanted, she affected to be angry at the voyage to Laputa, because it ridicules philosophical science. And in Brobdignag, she said, the proportions were not correct. I must, however, explain to you, that the use which I made of these dry studies with Ph[oe]be, was precisely the same which the ingenious Mr. Cheshire makes of his steel machines for defective shapes, to straiten a crooked tendency or strengthen a weak one. Having employed these means to set her mind upright, and to cure a wrong bias; as that skillful gentleman discards his apparatus as soon as the patient becomes strait, so have I discontinued these pursuits, for I never meant to make a mathematical lady. Jane has a fine ear and a pretty voice, and will sing and play well enough for any girl who is not to make music her profession. One or two of the others sing agreeably.