Miss Dobbin had been taught at school to curtsey, or “bob,” as she called it; but elsewhere she had learned to dance with anybody, and to execute “steps” which were the delight and envy of the kitchen at Berrie Down. At school she had been taught psalms and hymns and spiritual songs; but out of hours she had acquired a stock of ballads that would have horrified the propriety of the vicar of North Kemms, Priscilla’s native parish, had he been privileged to hear them. At school she was taught to read, write, cipher, and do sampler work; out of school it had ever been her pleasure and delight to mimic the peculiarities of mistress and master, of clergyman and clergyman’s wife, of the ladies who visited the school, and of her fellow-companions, playmates, father, mother, and society generally. She was but a young thing when she came to the Hollow, sixteen or thereabouts, with a scanty supply of clothes, a crinoline which was at once the plague and delight of her life, a net to contain her hair, and induce people to believe it was long like a grownup woman’s, and a stock of impudence that was, were Mrs. Piggott’s testimony on the subject reliable, “more than enough.” With Priscilla it was not, however, perhaps, that she had so much impudence as that she had so little reverence; and for this reason, spite of Mrs. Piggott’s high social position, her imposing cap, her stately manner, and her reminiscences of the good old times, the young girl treated her with as little ceremony as she might one of her playmates, and “answered the housekeeper back,”—an indignity which had never previously been inflicted on that individual by anyone, gentle or simple. “She had always lived with people above and below, as knew their places and kept to them, till ‘you came,’” she stated to Miss Dobbin; whereupon Miss Dobbin inquired— “O Lor’, there, ain’t you glad I am come, that you may see some new life?” Did Mrs. Piggott threaten to report Prissy to Mrs. Dudley, that young person entreated of her to make haste and do so, “before her shoes wore out.” Did the housekeeper, talking at Priscilla, endeavour to point a moral and adorn a tale by stating what was done in her young days—and what her first mistress, the lady of Mr. Serjeant Hickley, counsellor to the King (so Mrs. Piggott understood K.C.), said when she saw a servant with a bow or a bonnet, let alone a flower, added Mrs. Piggott parenthetically—Priscilla, rich in ribbons, flowers, and laces, flung to her from Miss Ormson’s stores, thanked her stars “she had not lived in them days, and thought it was quite time the good old times were gone and past, if anybody was to have any comfort of their lives.” “I’m sure I’m glad I warn’t born then, Mrs. Piggott; for one thing I’d be as old as you, and have nothing before me; I’d have lived it all, and not have a thing to look forward to.”