sir Edward at this time set me about a task which occupied the whole of my attention; he proposed that I should write a little interlude after the manner of the French Petites Pieces; and to try my ingenuity, no one was to see it before the representation except the performers, myself and my little friends, who as they were all younger than me, could not be expected to lend me much assistance.  I have already told you what a proud girl I was.  During the writing of this piece, the receiving of my young friends, and the instructing them in their several parts, I never felt myself of more importance.  With Ann my pride had somewhat slumbered; the difference of our rank left no room for competition; all was complacency and good humour on my part, and affectionate gratitude, tempered with respect, on hers.  But here I had full room to shew courtesy, to affect those graces—­to imitate that elegance of manners practised by lady Harriot to their mothers.  I was to be their instructress in action and in attitudes, and to receive their praises and their admiration of my theatrical genius.  It was a new scene of triumph for me, and I might then be said to be in the very height of my glory.

If the plot of my piece, for the invention of which they so highly praised me, had been indeed my own, all would have been well; but unhappily I borrowed from a source which made my drama end far differently from what I intended it should.  In the catastrophe I lost not only the name I personated in the piece, but with it my own name also; and all my rank and consequence in the world fled from me for ever.—­My father presented me with a beautiful writing-desk for the use of my new authorship.  My silver standish was placed upon it; a quire of gilt paper was before me.  I took out a parcel of my best crow quills, and down I sate in the greatest form imaginable.

I conjecture I have no talent for invention; certain it is that when I sate down to compose my piece, no story would come into my head, but the story which Ann had so lately related to me.  Many sheets were scrawled over in vain, I could think of nothing else; still the babies and the nurse were before me in all the minutiae of description Ann had given them.  The costly attire of the lady-babe,—­the homely garb of the cottage-infant,—­the affecting address of the fond mother to her own offspring;—­then the charming equivoque in the change of the children:  it all looked so dramatic:—­it was a play ready made to my hands.  The invalid mother would form the pathetic, the silly exclamations of the servants the ludicrous, and the nurse was nature itself.  It is true I had a few scruples, that it might, should it come to the knowledge of Ann, be construed into something very like a breach of confidence.  But she was at home, and might never happen to hear of the subject of my piece, and if she did, why it was only making some handsome apology.—­To a dependant companion, to whom I had been so very great a friend, it was not necessary to be so very particular about such a trifle.