portraits of Queen Elizabeth I recognized the resemblance to Betsy. She dressed elaborately with a high collar that reached over her ears and was very tall & meagre, and was, as I remember, like the Queen in that she was a faded beauty. Lonely spinsters sometime suffer from the thought that they've lived wasted lives. It must have soothed Betsy's last moments to remember how she could raise blood blisters on little boys' hands. My conscience once played me a very nasty trick. As you may suppose the greatest crime next to setting the school on fire, or running away, or something of that sort, was to tell a lie. If a little boy told a lie he was birched for it, and possibly went to hell hereafter. Telling a lie is sometimes a little boy's greatest temptation, and the elders have decided that it is the greatest crime. I was reading a novel called 'The Children of the New Forest,' and had got far on into the second volume and was so interested that I insisted upon telling all about it to the drawing-master, and he told me novels were lies, and was so emphatic that my conscience compelled me to shut that book. I still remember that I had just reached page 224 in the second volume. Yet that master who was such a fanatic for truth always touched up our water-colour drawings, and made them look like master-pieces, for the edification of our parents and for their deception. To my non-puritan eyes man's inconsistency is always a charm and it has often been his safe-guard. The great Queen Elizabeth used to spit and swear when the foreign ambassadors crossed her temper, yet I doubt whether she had distinguished nerves. Cecil said of her that she was sometimes greater than a man and sometimes less than a woman.