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In the evening we all went to the rooms.  The rooms, as they are called, consisted for this evening, of only one apartment, as there was not company enough to make more necessary, and a very plain, unadorned, and ordinary apartment that was.

The next morning we had the company of two young ladies at breakfast-the S. S. and a Miss Birch, a little girl but ten years old, whom the S. S. invited, well foreseeing how much we should all be obliged to her.  This Miss Birch is a niece of the charming Mrs. Pleydell,(105) and so like her, that I should have taken her for her daughter. yet she is not, now, quite so handsome; but as she will soon know how to display her beauty to the utmost advantage, I fancy, in a few years, she will yet more resemble her lovely and most bewitching aunt.  Everybody, she said, tells her how like she is to her aunt Pleydell.

As you, therefore, have seen that sweet woman, only imagine her ten years old, and you will see her sweet niece.  Nor does the resemblance rest with the person; she sings like her, laughs like her, talks like her, caresses like her, and alternately softens and animates just like her.  Her conversation is not merely like that of a woman already, but like that of a most uncommonly informed, cultivated, and sagacious woman; and at the same time that her understanding is thus wonderfully premature, she can, at pleasure, throw off all this rationality, and make herself a mere playful, giddy, romping child.  One moment, with mingled gravity and sarcasm, she discusses characters, and the next, with schoolgirl spirits, she jumps round the room; then, suddenly, she asks, “Do you know such or such a song?” and instantly, with mixed grace and buffoonery, singles out an object, and sings it; and then, before there has been time to applaud her, she runs into the middle of the room, to try some new step in a dance; and after all this, without waiting till her vagaries grow tiresome, she flings herself, with an affectionate air upon somebody’s lap, and there, composed and thoughtful, she continues quiet till she again enters into rational conversation.

Her voice is really charming—­infinitely the most powerful, as well as sweet, I ever heard at her age.  Were she well and constantly taught, she might, I should think, do anything,—­

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for two or three Italian songs, which she learnt out of only five months’ teaching by Parsons, she sung like a little angel, with respect to taste, feeling, and expression; but she now learns of nobody, and is so fond of French songs, for the sake, she says, of the sentiment, that I fear she will have her wonderful abilities all thrown away.  Oh, how I wish my father had the charge of her!

She has spent four years out of her little life in France, which has made her distractedly fond of the French operas, “Rose et Colas,” “Annette et Lubin,” etc., and she told us the story quite through of several I never heard of, always singing the sujet when she came to the airs, and comically changing parts in the duets.  She speaks French with the same fluency as English, and every now and then, addressing herself to the S. S.—­“Que je vous adore!”—­“Ah, permettez que je me mette `a vos pieds!” etc., with a dying languor that was equally laughable and lovely.