We find the doctor, about the year 1797, residing at Reading, with his phaeton, his spaniels and his greyhounds, and enjoying his good-fortune with all his wonted hilarity of spirit, prodigality of expense, and utter want of consideration for the future.... His daughter was at this time at school in Hans Place--a small square into which you turn on the right hand out of Sloane Street, as you go from Knightsbridge to Chelsea.... Once fairly entered at M. St. Quintin’s school, Mary Russell Mitford seems to have applied herself, with all her heart and mind, to learn whatever the masters and mistresses were prepared to teach her. French, Italian, history, geography, astronomy, music, singing, drawing, dancing, were not enough to satisfy her eager thirst for instruction: and we find her informing her mother that she intended to learn Latin.... Excepting music, there was no branch of education within her reach at the Hans Place School which she was not zealous and successful in the pursuit of; but in that accomplishment she took little pleasure. She never at any time of her life showed much taste or feeling for it. Like so very many precocious children, she was of a scrofulous temperament, and had suffered much from illness in her infancy. In person she was short for her age; and, there is no possibility of evading the word by any gentle synonym or extenuating periphrasis, she was, in sincere truth and very plain English, decidedly fat. Her face, of which the expression was kind, gentle, and intelligent, ought to have been handsome, for the features were all separately good and like her father’s, but from some almost imperceptible disproportion, and the total change of coloring, the beauty had evanesced. But although very plain in figure and in face, she was never common-looking. She showed in her countenance and in her mild self-possession, that she was no ordinary child; and with her sweet smile, her gentle temper, her animated conversation, her keen enjoyment of life, and her incomparable voice, there were few of the prettiest children of her age who won so much love and admiration from their friends, whether young or old, as little Mary Mitford. And except, indeed, that her hair became white at an early age, few persons, it may be added, in passing through so many vicissitudes of life, ever altered so little, either in character or appearance. [Sidenote: Home life after leaving school.]