I use the word advisedly, the direction of my studies, after my twelfth year, being almost entirely taken out of female hands, my mother feeling more confidence in the competence of persons of the other sex to impart to me the sound and thorough instruction she insisted on and which must moreover be in accordance with her own views, and not in the least on the pattern of the ordinary curriculum for girls. Religious instruction she had always been in the habit of giving us herself and she kept up the practice until within a few weeks of my confirmation, preparing over night with great pains the subject of the lesson which she gave us every morning at six o’clock, and which was sometimes a theological disquisition, sometimes a survey of ecclesiastical history. For these, as for all my other lessons, I had to write essays, rather for the purpose of obliging me to summarise and recapitulate systematically all that I had learnt, than as an encouragement to the expression of my own ideas; this exercise was, notwithstanding, probably of the greatest value to me as enabling me to acquire very early great facility with my pen. Already at quite an early age I had my own very decided views about style, and I remember as quite a child coming into conflict with the very first of my male teachers--one of the masters from the Neuwied Grammar-school, engaged to give me German lessons--concerning an essay on “Springtime,” I had written for him. Inspired by so congenial a theme, I had simply let myself go, and the pages I handed to Herr Nohl were probably more remarkable for originality than for academic correctness of form. Whether he laid too much stress on negligencies of styles, which in my youthful impetuosity I was too little inclined to heed, I can no longer say; but I know that his unsparing criticism of my work struck me as unjust, and that the corrections he proposed did not seem to me to improve it at all.