that seemed to act with mystical power on her own fancy, sometimes stimulating her to convulse the hearers with laughter, sometimes to melt them to tears.  When her power began to languish, she would spin again till fired to re-commence her singular drama, into which she wove figures from the scenes of her earlier childhood, her companions, and the dignitaries she sometimes saw, with fantasies unknown to life, unknown to heaven or earth.

’This excitement, as may be supposed, was not good for her.  It usually came on in the evening, and often spoiled her sleep.  She would wake in the night, and cheat her restlessness by inventions that teased, while they sometimes diverted her companions.

’She was also a sleep-walker; and this one trait of her case did somewhat alarm her guardians, who, otherwise, showed the profound ignorance as to this peculiar being, usual in the overseeing of the young.  They consulted a physician, who said she would outgrow it, and prescribed a milk diet.

’Meantime, the fever of this ardent and too early stimulated nature was constantly increased by the restraints and narrow routine of the boarding school.  She was always devising means to break in upon it.  She had a taste—­which would have seemed ludicrous to her mates, if they had not felt some awe of her, from the touch of genius and power that never left her—­for costume and fancy dresses.  There was always some sash twisted about her, some drapery, something odd in the arrangement of her hair and dress; so that the methodical preceptress dared not let her go out without a careful scrutiny and remodelling, whose soberizing effects generally disappeared the moment she was in the free air.

’At last a vent was assured for her in private theatricals.  Play followed play, and in these and the rehearsals, she found entertainment congenial with her.  The principal parts, as a matter of course, fell to her lot; most of the good suggestions and arrangements came from her:  and, for a time, she ruled mostly, and shone triumphant.

’During these performances, the girls had heightened their bloom with artificial red; this was delightful to them, it was something so out of the way.  But Mariana, after the plays were over, kept her carmine saucer on the dressing-table, and put on her blushes, regularly as the morning.  When stared and jeered at, she at first said she did it because she thought it made her look pretty; but, after a while, she became petulant about it,—­would make no reply to any joke, but merely kept up the habit.

’This irritated the girls, as all eccentricity does the world in general, more than vice or malignity.  They talked it over among themselves till they were wrought up to a desire of punishing, once for all, this sometimes amusing, but so often provoking non-conformist.  And having obtained leave of the mistress, they laid,