“I had struck seventeen in the year ’2, as I said before, and had just come home from being finished at a boarding-school of repute in those days, where I had learnt to talk the prettiest _ancien régime_ French and to hate Bonaparte with unchristian violence from a little ruined _émigre maréchale_; had also, with infinite expenditure of time, labour, and Berlin wool, wrought out ‘Abraham’s Sacrifice of Isaac’ and ‘Jacob’s First Kiss to Rachel,’ in finest cross-stitch. Now I had bidden adieu to learning; had inly resolved never to disinter ‘Télémaque’ and Thompson’s ‘Seasons’ from the bottom of my trunk; had taken a holiday from all my accomplishments with the exception of cross-stitch, to which I still faithfully adhered--and indeed, on the day I am going to mention, I recollect that I was hard at work on Judas Iscariot’s face in Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’--hard at work at it, sitting in the morning sunshine, on a straight-backed chair. We had flatter backs in those days; our shoulders were not made round by lolling in easy-chairs; indeed, no _then_ upholsterer made a chair that it was possible to loll in. My father rented a house near Plymouth at that time, an in-and-out _nooky_ kind of old house--no doubt it has fallen to pieces long years ago--a house all set round with unnumbered flowers, and about which the rooks clamoured all together from the windy elm tops. I was labouring in flesh-coloured wool on Judas’s left cheek, when the door opened and my mother entered. She looked as if something had freshly pleased her, and her eyes were smiling. In her hand she held an open and evidently just-read letter. “‘A messenger has come from Plymouth,’ she says, advancing quickly and joyfully towards me. ‘Your father will be here this afternoon.’ “‘_This afternoon!_’ cry I, at the top of my voice, pushing away my heavy work-frame. ‘How delightful! But how?--how can that happen?’ “‘They have had a brush with a French privateer,’ she answers, sitting down on another straight-backed chair, and looking again over the large square letter, destitute of envelope, for such things were not in those days, ‘and then they succeeded in taking her. Yet they were a good deal knocked about in the process, and have had to put into Plymouth to refit, so he will be here this afternoon for a few hours.’ “‘Hurrah!’ cry I, rising, holding out my scanty skirts, and beginning to dance. “‘Bobby Gerard is coming with him,’ continues my mother, again glancing at her despatch. ‘Poor boy, he has had a shot through his right arm, which has broken the bone, so your father is bringing him here for us to nurse him well again.’ “I stop in my dancing. “‘Hurrah again!’ I say brutally. ‘I do not mean about his arm; of course I am very sorry for that; but at all events, I shall see him at last. I shall see whether he is like his picture, and whether it is not as egregiously flattered as I have always suspected.’