Again she writes, “I went to the library the other day with Miss Rowden and brought back the first volume of Goldsmith’s _Animated Nature_. It is quite a lady’s natural history, and extremely entertaining.... The only fault is its length. There are eight volumes. But as I read it to myself, and read pretty quick, I shall soon get through it. I am likewise reading the _Odyssey_, which I even prefer to the _Iliad_. I think it beautiful beyond comparison.” Mrs. Mitford was staying in town in the summer of 1802, and she writes to her husband: “You would have laughed yesterday when M. St. Quintin was reading Mary’s English composition, of which the subject was, ‘The advantage of a well-cultivated mind’; a word struck him as needless to be inserted, and which after objecting to it he was going to expunge. Mam Bonette (a pet name), in her pretty meek way, urged the necessity of the word used. Miss Rowden was then applied to. She and I both asserted that the sentence would be incomplete without it. St. Quintin, on a more deliberate view of the subject, with all the liberality which is so amiable a point in his character, begged our daughter’s pardon, and the passage remained as it originally stood.” A young French girl, Mlle. Rose, had recently become an inmate of the schoolroom. She was an orphan, and her venerable grand-parents, who belonged to a noble Bretonne family, were now dependent upon her for support. The three were to be seen occasionally at M. St. Quintin’s hospitable supper-parties, and on such occasions Rose “always brought with her some ingenious straw-plaiting to make into fancy bonnets, which were then in vogue.... She was a pallid, drooping creature, whose dark eyes looked too large for her face.” She now brought her straw-plaiting into the schoolroom and also assisted in teaching French to the pupils. “About this time a little girl named Betsy, of a short, squat figure, plain in face and ill-dressed and overdressed, appeared at the school, brought by her father. They happened to arrive at the same time with the French dancing master, a marquis of the _ancien régime_. I never saw such a contrast between two men. The Frenchman was slim, long and pale, and allowing always for the dancing-master air, he might be called elegant. The Englishman was the beau-ideal of a John Bull, portentous in size, broad and red of visage, and loud of tongue. He did not stay five minutes, but that was time enough to strike monsieur with horror ... especially when his first words conveyed an injunction to the lady of the house ‘to take care that no grinning Frenchman had the ordering of his Betsy’s feet. If she must learn to dance, let her be taught by an honest Englishman.’ “Poor Betsy! there she sat, the tears trickling down her cheeks, little comforted by the kind notice of the governess and the English teacher. I made some girlish advances towards acquaintanceship which she was too shy or too miserable to return....