the Royal Gardes du Corps, whose looks were reported (I think rather mythologically) to be as superb as his attire.  In which case he must have been strikingly unlike his sister, who was one of the ugliest women I ever saw; with a disproportionately large and ill-shaped nose and mouth, and a terrible eruption all over her face.  She had, however, an extremely beautiful figure, exquisite hands and feet, skin as white as snow, and magnificent hair and eyes; in spite of which numerous advantages, she was almost repulsively plain:  it really seemed as if she had been the victim of a spell, to have so beautiful a body, and so all but hideous a face.  Besides these French ladies, there was a Miss McC——­, a very delicate, elegant-looking Irishwoman, and a Miss ——­, who, in spite of her noble name, was a coarse and inelegant, but very handsome Englishwoman.  In general, these ladies had nothing to do with us; they had privileged places at table, formed Mrs. Rowden’s evening circle in the drawing-room, and led (except at meals) a life of dignified separation from the scholars.

I remember but two French girls in our whole company:  the one was a Mademoiselle Adele de ——­, whose father, a fanatical Anglomane, wrote a ridiculous book about England.

The other French pupil I ought not to have called a companion, or said that I remembered, for in truth I remember nothing but her funeral.  She died soon after I joined the school, and was buried in the cemetery of Pere la Chaise, near the tomb of Abelard and Eloise, with rather a theatrical sort of ceremony.  She was followed to her grave by the whole school, dressed in white, and wearing long white veils fastened round our heads with white fillets.  On each side of the bier walked three young girls, pall-bearers, in the same maiden mourning, holding in one hand long streamers of broad white ribbon attached to the bier, and in the other several white narcissus blossoms.

The ghostly train and the picturesque mediaeval monument, close to which we paused and clustered to deposit the dead girl in her early resting-place, formed a striking picture that haunted me for a long time, and which the smell and sight of the chalk-white narcissus blossom invariably recalls to me.

Meantime, the poetical studies, or rather indulgencies of home, had ceased.  No sonorous sounds of Milton’s mighty music ever delighted my ears, and for my almost daily bread of Scott’s romantic epics I hungered and thirsted in vain, with such intense desire, that I at length undertook to write out “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” and “Marmion” from memory, so as not absolutely to lose my possession of them.  This task I achieved to a very considerable extent, and found the stirring, chivalrous stories, and spirited, picturesque verse, a treasure of refreshment, when all my poetical diet consisted of “L’Anthologie francaise a l’Usage des Demoiselles,” and Voltaire’s “Henriade,” which I was compelled to learn by heart, and with the opening lines of which I more than once startled the whole dormitory at midnight, sitting suddenly up in my bed, and from the midst of perpetual slumbers loudly proclaiming—­