thoroughly to enter into our merriment; we might laugh and romp to our heart’s content, her calm was unruffled, her patience inexhaustible. Our childish intuition had not been at fault in foreseeing that under her kindly sway our nursery would once more become a little paradise, the dearest corner for us in the whole house. We should have asked nothing better than to be left there as long as possible; but alas! the governess was already on the way to whom I was to be handed over, and who was antipathetic to me from the very first, her cleverness availing nothing to conceal that she was both underbred and ill-tempered. I fled as often as I could from her harshness and bad manners, back to the dear old nursery--back to the good angel, Barnes! I was surely somewhat young to have been removed at all from those gentle influences, but the step had been judged a wise one by my parents, in order to turn to account as early as possible the magnificent health and excellent abilities with which I was blessed. To this young, but physically fragile couple--the valetudinarian father, pale, melancholy, of sedentary and studious habits, and the mother, whose own natural liveliness was being undermined by the attacks of an insidious and baffling malady--to them there may well have been something disconcerting and almost alarming in the temperament of such a child, the quintessence of health, restless as quicksilver and blithe as a bird, in whose young limbs the joy of living pulsed wildly and on whose lips snatches of song were forever alternating with ringing laughter! It cannot be wondered at if they only saw in my high spirits a sure sign of frivolity, and that on every occasion on which my indomitable will showed itself, I should simply have been condemned as headstrong and obstinate.