me after all these years. What happy hours we passed, playing in the beautiful garden, which our friends shared in common with several other families, whom we also learned to know. It was such a delicious new sensation to us, of freedom from all restraint and supervision, our elders always remaining together talking, leaving us children to race unmolested through house and garden, exercising our active young limbs and our sound young lungs, and clearing away the cobwebs from our tired brains. Staircase, passages, basement, how well I remember it all, and the pastor himself, whom we thought at first rather stiff, but who occasionally unbent to joke with us. And his dear good wife, who let us do just whatever came into our heads, never interfering with our wildest play, as we tore through the rooms, springing down the stairs two or three steps at a time, and hiding in dark corners, whence we could spring out and frighten one another. On cold dull days we stayed indoors, acting charades, or sitting contentedly round the big dining-room table covered with oil-cloth, telling stories in turn, laughing and chattering, so perfectly happy and at our ease in these modest surroundings, and learning more French in half-an-hour than in a whole week’s lessons. The eldest daughter, Marie, was almost grown up, but I was especially fond of her, she was the leader in all our games, and told us most delightful stories. Her next sister, Minna, was more reserved, and did not care to join in our play, but then came two, just of our own age, Cècile and Charlotte. The last-named, who died quite young, was the sweetest little creature, and I still see her flying to meet us, with her long fair curls streaming behind her, and flinging her arms round us both in her joy to welcome us. The only son, a gentle, dreamy lad, of a serious turn of mind, afterwards became a pastor. Marie afterwards married the son of the celebrated preacher, Adolphe Monod, whose sermons were so much talked of, that it was a great disappointment to me not to be taken to hear him, but my mother would not consent to our going to church before we had attained our twelfth year.