DURING the great French war there were many French prisoners in my native town. They led a strange isolated life, for they knew nothing of our language, nor, in those days, did three people in the town understand theirs. The common soldiers amused themselves by making little trifles and selling them. I have now before me a box of coloured straw with the date 1799 on the bottom, which was bought by my grandfather. One of these prisoners was an officer named Leroy. Why he did not go back to France I never heard, but I know that before I was born he was living near our house on a small income; that he tried to teach French, and that he had as his companion a handsome daughter who grew up speaking English. What she was like when she was young I cannot say, but I have had her described to me over and over again. She had rather darkish brown hair, and she was tall and straight as an arrow. This she was, by the way, even into old age. She surprised, shocked, and attracted all the sober persons in our circle. Her ways were not their ways. She would walk out by herself on a starry night without a single companion, and cause thereby infinite talk, which would have converged to a single focus if it had not happened that she was also in the habit of walking out at four o’clock on a summer’s morning, and that in the church porch of a little village not far from us, which was her favourite resting-place, a copy of the _De Imitatione Christi_ was found which belonged to her. So the talk was scattered again and its convergence prevented. She used to say doubtful things about love. One of them struck my mother with horror. Miss Leroy told a male person once, and told him to his face, that if she loved him and he loved her, and they agreed to sign one another’s foreheads with a cross as a ceremony, it would be as good to her as marriage. This may seem a trifle, but nobody now can imagine what was thought of it at the time it was spoken. My mother repeated it every now and then for fifty years. It may be conjectured how easily any other girls of our acquaintance would have been classified, and justly classified, if they had uttered such barefaced Continental immorality. Miss Leroy’s neighbours were remarkably apt at classifying their fellow-creatures. They had a few, a very few holes, into which they dropped their neighbours, and they must go into one or the other. Nothing was more distressing than a specimen which, notwithstanding all the violence which might be used to it, would not fit into a hole, but remained an exception. Some lout, I believe, reckoning on the legitimacy of his generalisation, and having heard of this and other observations accredited to Miss Leroy, ventured to be slightly rude to her. What she said to him was never known, but he was always shy afterwards of mentioning her name, and when he did he was wont to declare that she was “a rum un.” She was not particular, I have heard, about personal