On the further side of the Forbury stood a large old-fashioned building adjoining the Abbey Gateway and bearing the name of the Abbey School. It was a school for “young ladies” of the ordinary type belonging to the eighteenth century, but which, at the time we are writing of, was gradually taking a higher position in general estimation. Three authoresses of very different degrees of fame were pupils in this establishment, namely: Jane Austen for a short time as a very young child, in about the year 1782, Miss Butt (afterwards Mrs. Sherwood) in 1790, and Mary Russell Mitford when the school was removed to London in 1798. The school had formerly been carried on under the management of a Mrs. Latournelle, a good-natured person but, as Mrs. Sherwood tells us, “only fit for giving out clothes for the wash, mending them, making tea and ordering dinners.” But after a time she took as a partner a young lady of talent and of excellent education who at once made her mark felt. What, however, caused the permanent success of the school was the arrival in Reading of a certain Monsieur St. Quintin, the son of a nobleman in Alsace—a man of very superior intellect—who had been secretary to the Comte de Moustier, one of the last ambassadors from Louis XVI to the Court of St. James. Having lost all his property in the French Revolution, he was thankful to accept the post of French teacher in Dr. Valpy’s school, and was soon afterwards recommended by the doctor as a teacher of French in the Abbey School. In course of time he married Mrs. Latournelle’s young partner, and they “soon so entirely raised the credit of the seminary,” writes Mrs. Sherwood, “that when I went there, there were above sixty girls under their charge. The style of M. St. Quintin’s teaching,” she says, “was lively and interesting in the extreme.” Dr. Mitford had been a warm friend to M. St. Quintin ever since his arrival in Reading, and there was much pleasant intercourse between the Mitfords and the St. Quintins. In the summer of 1798 the school was transferred to London, and Dr. and Mrs. Mitford, who had then decided to send their little daughter to school, were glad to place her under the friendly care of M. and Madame St. Quintin. [Illustration] CHAPTER IX THE SCHOOL IN HANS PLACE Monsieur and Madame St. Quintin, on removing the Abbey School from Reading to London, established it in Hans Place, a small oblong square of pleasant-looking houses with a garden in the centre. It was almost surrounded by fields, for London proper terminated in those days with the double toll-gates at Hyde Park Corner. The school-house (No. 22) was one of the largest in the place, and possessed a spacious garden abounding in fine trees, smooth lawns and gay flower-beds. Thither the little Mary was sent on the reopening of the school after the midsummer holidays of the year 1798. Writing in later years she thus describes the event:—