Rosa, the eldest of the family, born in 1822, was ten years old when her mother died. Not long after, Raymond Bonheur decided to leave Bordeaux and to return to Paris, where the chances for professional success were better than in a provincial town, and where there were greater opportunities for the education of his young children. The change proved very distasteful, however, to the little ones. Accustomed to the comparative freedom of the town in which they had been brought up, and where their family had been so long rooted that their circle of friends and relatives gave them playmates and companions in plenty, they found themselves very lonely in Paris, where they were reduced for a good part of the time to such amusement as they could find in the narrow quarters of their rooms on the sixth floor of an apartment-house. It is not the custom in Paris for the children, even of the poor, to make a playground of the street, and our little ones had nobody to walk out with them but an old servant who had come with them from Bordeaux, and who was ill-fitted, for all her virtues, to take a mother's place to the children. She was honest and faithful, but like all of her class, she liked routine and order, and she could make no allowances for the restlessness of her bright-minded charge. Rosa was her especial torment; the black sheep of the brood. Household tasks she despised, and study, as it was pursued in the successive schools to which her despairing father sent her, had no charms for her. Her best playmates were animals; the horses and dogs she saw in the streets and which she fearlessly accosted; the sheep that found itself queerly lodged on the top floor of a city house; and the parrot which, as we have seen, was not only her playmate but her schoolmaster.