At Southport we had a queer little governess, Miss Brown, who came to us highly recommended both as to her personal character and for ability to instruct us in arithmetic and geometry, geography, English composition, and the rudiments of French. She was barely five feet in height, and as thin and dry as an insect; and although her personal character came up to any eulogium that could be pronounced upon it, her ignorance of the "branches" specified was, if possible, greater than our own. She was particularly perplexed by geometry; she aroused our hilarity by always calling a parallelogram a parallel-O-gram, with a strong emphasis on the penultimate syllable; and she spent several days repeating over to herself, with a mystified countenance, the famous words, "The square of the hypothenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two legs." What were legs of a triangle, and how, if there were any, could they be square? She never solved this enigma; and although we liked little Miss Brown very much, she speedily lost all shadow of control over us; we treated her as a sort of inferior sister, and would never be serious. "English governess" became for us a synonym for an amiable little nonentity who knew nothing; and I was surprised to learn, later, from the early works of Miss Rhoda Broughton, that they could be beautiful and intelligent. Miss Brown did not outlast our residence in Southport. From Southport we removed to Manchester, and thence, after exhausting the exposition, to Leamington, where we spent September and October of 1857. We expected to proceed direct from Leamington to France and Italy, but we were destined to be delayed in London till January of 1858.