CHAPTER XVII. THE YOUNG LADIES.

CÆSAR and Pompey were very much alike;
especially Cæsar; by which I mean, the days at
Rhododendron House. For weeks, for months,
from half year to half year, they knew scarcely
any change. It was a well-ordered school, and
the management most methodical. The result
was a dead level of uniformity, distressing to
erratic minds, but delectable exceedingly to those
who loved regularity and appreciated discipline.

The "getting-up bell" was the same every
day; the five-and-thirty rose amidst the same
yawning, stretches, and inarticulate grumblings;
there were the same peevish scuffling and
unsatisfactory toilette in the lavatory; the same
prayer-meeting, the same homilies; that is to say, when
Mrs. Bunnycastle had reached the end of the
dean's volume, she began again at the beginning,
and read the salutary tome through again. The
boarders should properly have known those
homilies by heart; but I question whether any
three of them could have repeated, without book,
four consecutive sentences of any one of the dean's
discourses. The fact is, the time occupied in
this lecture was the time chosen by the young
ladies for comparing notes in low whispers on
those minor cosas de España, the affairs of schoolgirls:
for passing surreptitious articles of merchandise
from hand to hand under the desks, and
for "having out" sundry trifling disputes of the
previous evening or the instant morning, by the
interchange of sly nips and pinches, nudgings
and raspings of boots against ankles. They were
but children, and I dare say not more spiteful to
each other than nuns in a convent. Was it
not while Mrs. Bunnycastle was warming to the
very close of one of the dean's most flourishing
perorations, that Miss Dallwallah, the young lady
connected with the Honourable East India
Company's Civil Service, and who had been
forwarded direct from Serampore to Stockwell
with a cautionary note from her papa, stating
that she had "a devil of a temper"— was it not
then that this young lady, being suddenly roused
to ungovernable ire by a pinch from Miss
Libscombe, her neighbour, who had a remarkably
ingenious knack of holding flesh between her
finger and thumb, fell upon that young lady, and
bit her in the arm? Mr. Drax had to be sent
for; the vindictive Dallwallah's teeth were
sharp, and she had drawn blood. The biter,
it is regrettable to say, did not manifest the
slightest compunction for the outrage. "It
served Libby right," she coolly remarked; " and
as for biting her arm half through, I'm sure I wish
it had been her nose!" Miss Dallwallah was
fifteen, and was not only insensible to the law of
kindness, but too big to have her ears boxed.
She was a very rich young lady; and had so
many ornaments of barbaric pearls and gold, that
the girls used to call her, Juggernaut. She was
a parlour-boarder, and exceedingly good
tempered, save when contradicted. The Bunnycastles
were puzzled how to treat the case, when
they were relieved from their perplexity by the
sudden removal of Miss Libscombe by her
mamma, who was fiercely indignant at the treatment
her daughter had received, and spoke of
Miss Dallwallah as " that hyæna." Miss Miller,
who came of country parents, and was the great
retailer of superstitious legends and folk-lore to
the establishment, opined that Miss Dallwallah
was mad, and that sooner or later Miss
Libscombe would be seized with hydrophobia.

"She'll bark like a dog," quoth Miss Miller,
"and run about biting other girls, and then her
father and mother 'll be obliged to have her
smothered between two mattresses."

"What nonsense!" exclaimed Miss Tallboys,
the eldest of the parlour-boarders, and the
captainess, indeed, of the school, for she was
nearly seventeen years of age.  "Smothered
between two mattresses indeed!  What next?
Why, the magistrates wouldn't allow such a
thing."

"I tell you it would be done. It's the law."

"I think I ought to know," retorted Miss
Tallboys, loftily. "My papa is in the
commission of the peace for the county of Kent, and
I'm sure he wouldn't allow such cruelty."

"Your papa is only a brewer," Miss Miller
went on, in great wrath, "and magistrates are
gentlemen."

"I remember his beer," little Laura Smiler
broke in, maliciously.  "Tallboys and Co.'s
Creaming Rochester Ales. My papa used to
have it, till he said they put gall instead of hops
into it."

"You're an impudent little— " was beginning,
in great indignation, the insulted county
magistrate's daughter, when the formidable Miss
Dallwallah came lounging into the room— it
was a half-holiday, and the elder girls were
gathered chatting round the stove— in her usual
lazily defiant manner.

"Miss Miller says you're mad," broke in a
chorus of shrill voices.

"Perhaps you'd like to bite me," Miss Miller
herself continued, tossing her curls, which were
flaxen, and turning up her nose, which was
snub.

"I don't want to bite anybody," replied the
Indian, quite humble now. "I am a mad
passionate creature, and I ought to have said I
was sorry I bit Lizzy Libby. I'm sorry I bit
her.  Only she vexed me.  I'm sorry she's gone
away, and if I could find out where she lived I'd
take her my little enamelled gold watch, and ask
her on my knees to accept it and forgive me.
But she shouldn't have vexed me."

"She was a vulgar little thing," Miss Tallboys
remarked, disdainfully.

"But it was very wicked of me to bite her,"
went on the repentant Begum. "And Mrs.
Bunnycastle ought to have punished me. I
deserved to be locked up in the coal-hole, with
bread and water for a fortnight, only my papa's
so rich, and I've always been brought up to do
as I like."

  "She says her papa's a magistrate," resumed