Our lessons went on pretty much as at first. With Mr. Olman, I was rather a check upon Grace, and the poor man began to regard me with something like gratitude. He was a good teacher, and gave me plenty of work, for which I, in my turn, was grateful. Our French lessons, it appeared to me, were rather a hollow mockery, Mdlle. Berteau, our preceptress, being a chatty little woman, who spent one-half her time in gossiping with Grace about Paris and pretty things, and the other half in helping her write the exercises she had been too lazy to prepare the night before. I also found later, that mademoiselle had been in the habit of supplying her young pupil surreptitiously with some rather questionable French literature. Upon a threat of disclosing this circumstance to mamma, Grace made me a solemn promise to renounce it; but I must confess I never felt any great security about its fulfillment. Our German proved rather more satisfactory. Mr. Waschlager, a strapping, burly, bearded fellow, with a loud voice and considerable energy of manner, inspired Miss Grace with much greater respect than delicate Mr. Olman, with his nervousness and tremor. His imperfect knowledge of our mother-tongue, also, rendered any sly innuendoes quite powerless to annoy him, and Grace's very strikingly imperfect knowledge of _his_ maternal mode of speech, put it quite out of her ability to insult him, if she had dared. So that, with the exception of having ordinarily to write her exercises for her, and give her the benefit of my researches in the dictionary at the last moment, I enjoyed my German lesson very much, and made quite rapid advances in that language.