When Fräulein Lavater came as governess to my mother the latter was just six years old, and she herself a mere girl of eighteen, with big brown eyes and black hair. She was, however, already remarkably well-read in the literature of several languages, and this she always declared she owed in a great measure to the circumstance that the nonsense called children’s books did not exist in her childhood, she and her brothers and sisters being consequently obliged to have recourse for such amusement as they sought in reading, to the little collection of the best poets and prose-writers, of whose works their mother’s library was composed. It was thus that she had read nearly all Shakespeare’s plays when she was eight years old. In order to indulge their taste for reading, without always having to be guided by the choice of their elders, these young people had, she told us, discovered a most ingenious method of quietly pushing open a panel of the bookcase, making an aperture just wide enough to introduce the smallest arm among them, with which several coveted volumes would be fetched down from the shelves, and carried off to some safe hiding-place, to be brought out and devoured at leisure afterwards. It was not considered necessary in those days to pass a public examination in order to give a proof of one’s knowledge and abilities, and in the person of our “Fräulchen,” as she was affectionately called, we had a striking example of the high degree of intellectual culture that may be attained by careful and intelligent home training and a liberal course of general reading. It was in the latter respect, above all, that the superiority of independent study over the modern cramming system, was in this instance so abundantly proved. A very few minutes’ conversation sufficed to show how much more solid information was possessed by the quiet little bookworm than by many a paragon of the latest methods of instruction, however much the latter might be advertised by the diploma conferred on her by the State. It would almost seem indeed as if no time were left for original thought or true mental culture in the schemes of our newest educational oracles, which apparently aim at reducing all mankind to one dull level of mediocrity, forcing all into the selfsame groove, and trying to make one pattern serve for all of us, utterly regardless both of our aptitudes and our requirements. I fancy that before long there must come a reaction from this unlucky craze, and that women at any rate will once more content themselves with cultivating their mental powers to the utmost, feeling therein a higher satisfaction than is to be derived from the noisier successes of a public examination.