She would dart out of doors the moment she saw the new moon, and give a wild cry of joy if the old moon was in her arms. Any moon in a gusty night, with a scud of torn clouds, would wake in her an ecstasy. Her old nurse, who had come with her--a strange creature, of what mingled blood no one knew--told of her that she was sometimes seized with such a longing for the ocean, that she would lie for hours ere she went to sleep, moaning with the very moan of its pebble-margined waves. When “in the bush,” she would upon occasion wander about from morning to night. No trouble able to keep her still had ever yet laid hold of her. But she had grown neither coarse nor unfeeling through lack of human intercourse. Nature was to her what she was to Wordsworth's Lucy, and made her a lady of her own. As to what is commonly called education, she had not had the best. Since coming to England, she had had governesses, but none fit for the office. Not merely had no one of them that rare gift, the teaching genius--the faculty of waking hunger and thirst; that would have mattered little, for Barbara needed no such rousing; she was eager to know, and yet more eager to understand; but not one of those teachers knew enough to answer a quarter of Barbara's questions, or was even capable of perceiving that those she could not answer, pointed to anything worth knowing. Among fashionable girls, affecting a free and easy, or even rough style, Barbara was notable for a sweet, unconscious, graceful daring, never for even a playful rudeness. Nothing she ever did or said or attempted could be called rough, while yet she would say things to make a vulgar duchess stare. Had she been affected, she would have drawn fools and repelled men; real, she charmed alike men and fools. She had read few books worth reading--had read a few which one would not have chosen she should read, for she grasped at anything a passer-by might have left. Of books properly so called, she knew nothing, therefore had not a notion which to read now she might choose. She imagined them all attractive--but at the first assay turned from the burlesque with a kind of loathing. This made some of her new acquaintance, not refined enough to understand the peculiarity, as it seemed to them, set her down as stupid.