“It happened that our school-house ... was so built that the principal reception-room was connected with the entrance-hall by a long passage and two double doors. This room, fitted up with nicely bound books, contained, amongst other musical instruments, the harp upon which I was sent to practise every morning. I was sent alone, [and was] most comfortably out of sight and hearing of every individual in the house, the only means of approach being through the two resounding green baize doors, swinging to with a heavy bang the moment they were let go. As the change from piano to harp ... had by no means worked a miracle, I very shortly betook myself to the book-shelves, and seeing a row of octavo volumes lettered _Théâtre de Voltaire_, I selected one of them and had deposited it in front of the music-stand and perched myself upon the stool to read it in less time than an ordinary pupil would have consumed in getting through the first three bars of _Ar Hyd y Nos_. “The play upon which I opened was _Zaïre_. There was a certain romance in the situation, an interest in the story.... So I got through _Zaïre_, and when I had finished _Zaïre_ I proceeded to other plays—_Ædipe_, _Mérope_, _Algire_, _Mahomet_, plays well worth reading, but not so absorbing as to prevent my giving due attention to the warning doors, and putting the book in its place, and striking the chords of _Ar Hyd y Nos_ as often as I heard a step approaching. “But when the dramas of Voltaire were exhausted and I had recourse to some neighbouring volumes the state of matters changed at once. The new volumes contained the comedies of Molière, and once plunged into the gay realities of this delightful world, all the miseries of this globe of ours—harp, music-books, practisings, and lessons—were forgotten.... I never remembered that there was such a thing as time; I never heard the warning doors; the only tribulations that troubled me were the tribulations of _Sganarelle_, the only lessons I thought about—the lessons of the ‘Bourgeois Gentilhomme.’ So I was caught; caught in the very act of laughing till I cried over the apostrophes of the angry father to the galley, in which he is told his son has been taken captive, ‘Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère!’ “Luckily, however, the person who discovered my delinquency was one of my chief spoilers—the husband of our good school mistress. Accordingly when he could speak for laughing, what he said sounded far more like a compliment upon my relish for the comic drama than a rebuke. I suppose that he spoke to the same effect to my father. At all events the issue of the affair was the dismissal of the poor little harp mistress and a present of a cheap edition of Molière for my own reading.” And writing in after years Miss Mitford says: “I have got the set still—twelve little foreign-looking books, unbound, and covered with a gay-looking pink paper, mottled with red, like certain carnations.”