Then she was a wonderful trumpeter of her own fame; made frequent visitations at houses where she was well entertained, and her bombast was listened to for the sake of her young charges; held half-yearly recitations, and also exhibitions of the plain sewing, embroidery, knitting, knotting, filigrees, tambour, and lace work of her pupils; and matrons proud of their own daughters’ achievements seldom paused to reckon up the tears, the headaches, the heartaches, the sore fingers which those minutely-stitched shirts, those fine lace aprons and ruffles, those pictures and samplers had cost. For Madame Broadbent, besides being a martinet rigid in her rule—having a numbered rack for pattens and slippers, numbered pegs for cloaks and hats, book-bags and work-bags, safe-guards (receptacles for sewing, &c., like a huckster’s pocket) and slates, all numbered likewise—was not of too mild a temper, and had a _penchant_ for pinching her pupils’ ears until the blood tinged her nails; and stocks for the feet, backboards for the shoulders, and dry bread diet were her prescriptions for the cure of such delinquencies as an unauthorised word, an omitted curtsey, a bag or garment on the wrong hook, a dropped stitch in knitting, a blotted copy, a puckered seam; and work had to be done and undone until stitches were almost invisible, and little eyes almost blind. She had other peculiarities, had Madame Broadbent—but my portrait is growing too large for its frame, and she was not a large personage at all. It was to this delectable individual’s school (“establishments” had not been invented then, or hers would have been one) that Miss Augusta Ashton was consigned for conversion into a well-behaved, well-informed, useful, and accomplished young lady. Her cousins, the Misses Chadwick, had in their turn escaped from this penitentiary for the manufacture of ladyhood. But in Piccadilly was a school of a very different description, where young ladies of talent and fortune went to qualify for _wifehood_; and here at this time Ellen Chadwick was finishing her education, with many others, in learning _the culinary art_ in all its branches. How came it that Madame Broadbent’s school flourished and survived the decay of its neighbourhood, being in existence when the writer of this was a child, and the other had died and been forgotten, save by the antiquary, before she was born?