precept; the untiring gentleness with which he
made our stubborn Enghsh tongues pronounce,
and mispronounce, and repronounce certain
words; above all, the sweetness of temper
which never varied, were such as I have never
seen equalled. If we wondered at these
qualities when we were children, how much
greater has been our surprise at their existence
since we have been grown up, and have
learnt that, until his emigration, he was a man
of rapid and impulsive action, with the
imperfect education implied in the circumstance
that at fifteen he was a sous-lieutenant in the
Queen's regiment, and must, consequently,
have had to apply himself hard and conscientiously
to master the language which he had
in after-life to teach.

Twice we had holidays to suit his sad
convenience. Holidays with us were not
at Christmas and Midsummer, Easter and
Michaelmas. If my mother was unusually
busy, we had what we called a holiday;
though, in reality, it involved harder work
than our regular lessons; but we fetched
and carried, and ran errands, and became
rosy and dusty, and sang merry songs in the
gaiety of our hearts. If the day was
remarkably fine, my dear father—whose spirits
were rather apt to vary with the weather—
would come bursting in with his bright, kind,
bronzed face, and carry the day by storm
with my mother. "It was a shame to coop
such young things up in a house," he would
say, "when every other young animal was
frolicking in the air and sunshine. Grammar!
—what was that but the art of arranging
words?—and he never knew a woman but
could do that fast enough. Geography!—he
would undertake to teach us more geography
in one winter evening, telling us of the
countries where he had been, with just a
map before him, that we could learn in ten
years with that stupid book, all full of hard
words. As for the French—why that must
be learnt, for he should not like M. de
Chalabre to think we slighted the lessons he
took so much pains to give us; but surely,
we could get up the earlier to learn our
French." We promised by acclamation; and
my mother—sometimes smilingly, sometimes
reluctantly—was always compelled to yield.
And these were the usual occasions for our
holidays. But twice we had a fortnight's
entire cessation of French lessons: once in
January, and once in October. Nor did we
even see our dear French master during those
periods. We went several times to the top
of the clover-field, to search the dark green
outskirts of the forest with our busy eyes;
and if we could have seen his figure in that
shade, I am sure we should have scampered
to him, forgetful of the prohibition which
made the forest forbidden ground. But we
did not see him.

It was the fashion in those days to keep
children much less informed than they are
now on the subjects which interest their
parents. A sort of hieroglyphic or cypher talk
was used, in order to conceal the meaning of
much that was said, if children were present.
My mother was a proficient in this way of
talking, and took, we fancied, a certain
pleasure in perplexing my father by inventing
a new cypher, as it were, every day. For
instance, for some time I was called Martia,
because I was very tall of my age; and just as
my father had begun to understand the
name—and, it must be owned, a good while
after I had learnt to prick up my ears whenever
Martia was named—my mother suddenly
changed me into "the buttress," from the
habit I had acquired of leaning my languid
length against a wall. I saw my father's
perplexity about this "buttress" for some
days, and could have helped him out of it,
but I durst not. And so, when the unfortunate
Louis the Sixteenth was executed, the
news was too terrible to be put into plain
English, and too terrible also to be made
known to us children, nor could we at once
find the clue to the cypher in which it was
spoken about. We heard about "the Iris
being blown down;" and saw my father's
honest loyal excitement about it, and the
quiet reserve which always betokened some
secret grief on my mother's part.

We had no French lessons; and somehow
the poor, battered, storm-torn Iris was to
blame for this. It was many weeks after
this before we knew the full reason of M. de
Chalabre's deep depression when he again
came amongst us: why he shook his head
when my mother timidly offered him some
snowdrops on that first morning on which we
began lessons again: why he wore the deep
mourning of that day, when all of the dress that
could be black was black, and the white
muslin frills and ruffles were unstarched and
limp, as if to bespeak the very abandonment
of grief. We knew well enough the meaning
of the next hieroglyphic announcement—"The
wicked cruel boys had broken off the White
Lily's head!" That beautiful queen, whose
portrait once had been shown to us, with her
blue eyes, and her fair resolute look, her
profusion of lightly powdered hair, her white
neck, adorned with strings of pearls. We
could have cried, if we had dared, when
we heard the transparent mysterious words.
We did cry at night, sitting up in bed,
with our arms round each other's necks, and
vowing, in our weak, passionate, childish
way, that if we lived long enough, that lady's
death avenged should be. No one who
cannot remember that time can tell the
shudder of horror that thrilled through the
country at hearing of this last execution. At
the moment, there was no time for any
consideration of the silent horrors endured for
centuries by the people, who at length rose
in their madness against their rulers. This
last blow changed our dear M. de Chalabre.
I never saw him again in quite the same
gaiety of heart as before this time. There