There was much excitement on my father’s birthday. The house was full of guests, and an orchestra came down from town. At dinner when papa’s health was drunk, two large cannons, placed at the principal entrance, were fired, which made me crawl on my hands and knees, shamefully, under the table. We had in the evening grand illuminations in the park, with fireworks which did not enrapture me, for at every burst of rockets I had to put my hands over my ears. On the day of our village festival there was a fair on the square opposite the church. I threw sugar-candy and handfuls of pennies to the peasant children. I had now passed my eighth year and the time for lessons had come. I was given over to the care of a French governess, Melle. Rose, who was very badly named, for she was a horrid lemon-coloured old creature, wearing a hideous curled wig, and always looking as though she had just swallowed a spoonful of vinegar. I hated plain people about me and could not bare the sight of Melle. Rose, disliking her from the first. What a life I led her! Plaguing her was a charmingly pretty sport for me. My governess was always scolding and faultfinding; she forced me to make her every morning and evening a low curtsey, which made me long to kick her. Melle. Rose held up as an example to me a little friend of mine, the Princess Mimi Troubetzkoy, who was a well-behaved child, doing credit to her governess’s bringing up, and never giving her any trouble. But I despised sheep-like docility and was weary of hearing of all the beautiful things Mimi did and said. Being deprived of the bump of respect, I did exactly what my governess told me not to do, refusing to be put into harness. When the fighting-blood stirred in me and made me too horribly naughty, I was sent for punishment to bed, but I would rather be cut to pieces before I would deign to apologise to Melle. Rose. That disagreeable person was succeeded by Melle. Allamand, a French lady educated in England, the most delightful of old maids, whom I loved fondly, for she was never cross, and since she came to me, I began to understand that it was possible for a governess to be nice, and that the term is not necessarily synonymous to frighten and bore.