Her family regard it only as traditional that their mother was descended from Mrs. Fleetwood, the daughter of Oliver Cromwell; but I had it as an accepted fact from one of the undoubted members of that family, who was proud to claim even so remote a connection with one whom she had so much admired. Miss Andrews must have been educated at Mrs. Wyand’s school, in the generation preceding Miss Buss, and she probably spoke with authority on the matter. She also had remarkable power as a teacher, with quite original views on education, a fact interesting as throwing a sidelight on the school in which Miss Buss was educated, the best in the neighbourhood of Mornington Crescent. In a book of “Memories,” compiled for the family circle of Dr. Henry Buss—the “Uncle Henry” to whom, as a girl, “Fanny” owed some of her first holiday trips abroad—we find it recorded that “in 1689, William and Mary brought in their train from Holland a Mrs. Buss, who held the post of nurse to the Princess Anne, afterwards queen.” The descendants of Mrs. Buss settled chiefly in the county of Kent. At Bromley, in 1775, we find one of them, Robert Buss, holding a post in the Excise. He afterwards became a schoolmaster at Tunbridge. His son, William Church Buss, became known as “a skilled engraver,” and, marrying “pretty Mary Anne Starling,” made his home, in 1803, in Jewin Street, Aldersgate. We must dismiss entirely all our present associations with Aldersgate, and go back to the beginning of the century, to the description given by Dr. Buss of the city at the time when his parents made their home there— “At this time the city itself was separated by fields from the village of Islington. It was the custom for pedestrians, especially after dark, to collect at Aldersgate-bars in sufficient force to protect each other from footpads, while crossing the fields to this village. “The site of the existing City Road Basin was a market garden, thus utilized when the Grand Junction Canal Company extended their waterway through the city to the Thames. From the village of Islington to Highgate and Hampstead it was nearly all fields. Copenhagen House stood in the midst of cornfields. This spot is now the centre of New Smithfield Cattle Market.... The river Fleet was then as wide as the New River, and was supplied with boats for rowing. Excepting the Thames, it was the nearest river, and also a favourite bathing-place for the youth of London.” There was probably no great change, as it was still before the days of steam and rail, when the little granddaughter of William Church Buss was sent to visit her grandparents, who had then removed to Newgate Street. Her maternal grandparents still lived in Clerkenwell, near the market gardens there.