Her own harmonious and well balanced disposition enabled our dear “Fräulchen” to play the part of peace-maker among stormier natures, and her influence was ever used for good. Never in thirty years of the closest intimacy did I hear a single word fall from her lips, by which I could possibly have felt hurt; and I was as ultra-sensitive and liable to take offence, as are most children, who are too harshly brought up. With others I was always looking out for blame,--a scolding seemed the natural thing to expect,--never with her! She could find fault, too, when it was needful, but with so much tact and kindness, and accompanying her criticism with reflections that took away all its bitterness and made it sound almost like indirect praise; and then when I looked up at her, half in alarm, with her soft little hand she would stroke mine and say smiling:--“There was the horrid little serpent concealed beneath the roses, was it not?” She was for ever pouring oil on the troubled waters, making life better and happier for everyone, and most of all for us poor children, who had in many respects a very hard time, in an atmosphere so little conducive to our healthy and happy development. We were accustomed to say among ourselves that we were a three-leaved shamrock of ill-luck, our initials--(of all our names, Otto, Wilhelm, and Elizabeth),--forming together the sound Oweh, or Woe! Poor little woful shamrock in truth it was! We often stood in need of someone to protect us, our parents’ ill-health placing us so entirely in the hands of our first governesses and nursery-governesses, who unfortunately happened to be anything but fitted for a position of such trust. We should have suffered still more from their harsh treatment and rough ways, had not Fräulein Lavater constantly stepped in, to interpose calmly and gently on our behalf. My gratitude towards her knew no bounds, and can find but scant expression in the words I write, which seem cold and colourless beside the feelings that dictate them. She alone understood the restless workings of my imagination, its insatiable thirst of beauty, not to be stilled by the daily portion of dull dry fact, which was alone provided by our earliest instruction, she alone cared to satisfy the intense longing for poetry, for literature, for some other knowledge than was contained in the little scholastic manuals of science and history on which our young minds were almost exclusively fed. Thanks to her, when I was eight years old, I was liberated from the very disagreeable young governess who had tyrannised over me since my fourth year, and a friend of her own substituted, an amiable and highly-instructed woman, with whom I at once made great progress, my studies becoming from that moment a real delight to me. Grammar, and French grammar above all, was a real passion with me, and unconsciously I was already then, in my love of languages and of language itself,