"My little girl does not like her books as well as I could wish," wrote the Duchess to her mother; but the grandmother took the part of the child. "Do not tease your little puss with learning," was her reply. "She is so young still. Albert is only making eyes at a picture book." This Albert was one of the Princess' German cousins only a few weeks younger than she; and the great delight of the Coburg grandmother was to compare the growth and attainments of the two children and note all their amusing little speeches. The Duchess, however, did not follow the advice of her mother, but more than a month before her little daughter was four years old she decided to engage a tutor for her. She herself and Feodore were reading English with the Rev. Mr. Davys, the clergyman of a neighboring parish, and during even the first few lessons the Duchess was so charmed with his gentle, kindly manner and his intellectual ability that she said to him one day: "You teach so well that I wish you would teach my little daughter." So it was that the learned clergyman appeared at the palace one bright April morning armed with a box of alphabet blocks. The Duchess seemed quite troubled and anxious about the small child's intellectual deficiencies, and when the preparations for the lesson had been made, she said: "Now, Victoria, if you are good and say your lesson well, I will give you the box of bright-colored straw that you wanted." "I'll be good, mamma," the little girl promised, "but won't you please give me the box first?" The lesson began with a review of the alphabet; then came a struggle with the mysterious _b-a, b-e, b-i, b-o, b-u, b-y_, "which we did not quite conquer," the tutor regretfully writes. Mr. Davys kept a journal of the progress of the Princess during the first two years of his instruction, and he records gravely after the second lesson that she pronounced _much_ as _muts_, that he did not succeed in teaching her to count as far as five, and that when he tried to show her how to make an _o_, he could not make her move her hand in the right direction. It seems to have been a somewhat willful little hand, for a week later when he wished her to make an _h_, she would make nothing but _o's._ "If you will make _h_ to-day," said the patient tutor, "you shall have a copy of _o's_ to-morrow;" but when to-morrow had come and the copy had been prepared, the capricious little maiden did not care to make _o_, she preferred to make _h_.