visage, asked him this alarming question:
"Missa Drax, are you my pappa?'' The discreet
medical practitioner was dreadfully disconcerted
at this crude interrogatory. Old Mrs Bunnycastle
bleated,  "Lawk a' mercy, what next?"
Two of the Miss Bunnycastles tittered; but the
third, Miss Barbara, told Lily, severely, that
she would never be anything better than a little
idiot.

Meanwhile, she had set herself, first intuitively,
next, of her own volition, to learn things. I don't
mean lessons. For the first year all the resources
of the law of kindness were powerless to teach
her, even her lessons; and although Miss
Barbara had a dim impression that she should
properly by this time be deep in the mysteries
of Mangnall, she forbore, after a while, to set her
tasks which she could not by any possibility
grasp even the remotest meaning of, and consoled
herself with the thought that there was
plenty of time to rescue her from the perilous
condition of a dunce. So Lily was left to a few
books that had pictures in them, and but few
attempts were made to drum the significance of
the accompanying letter-press into her head. She
was too small to stand up in a class— too small
to have copy-books, or good marks, or bad marks
— too small for anything, in fact, save to wander
or trot about as she listed, from house to playground,
from playground to school-ground—
now talking to the furniture, and now to the
teachers— now listening, with demure astonishment,
to the eloquence of Mrs. Bunnycastle,
which was Greek to her— to the orations of the
governesses, which were Hebrew to her— and to
the monotonous drone of the young ladies, as at
appointed times and seasons they repeated their
lessons. In fine, she became as much a pet and
plaything in the establishment as any very tiny
domestic animal that was neither troublesome
nor spiteful, but very playful and very affectionate,
might have been. Miss Barbara was of
opinion that she should be kept "strict;" but, at
last, even she joined in the general concession, and
seemed to be as fond of Lily as every one else in
the house was.

But, all this time, Lily was learning things.
She knew the playground by heart. She had
almost a pre-Raphaelite acquaintance, mentally,
with the bricks, with their various hues, now red,
now russet, now purple; with the mossy rime that
covered some of them, with the small beetles
that did wonderful acrobatic feats on their acclivities,
rivalling the soldiers of General Wolfe, who
marched up rocks that were quite perpendicular.
She knew the tears which the strong mortar had
shed, on first being laid between the courses, and
which the trowel had forgotten to scrape away—
tears which the air had hardened into imperishable
durability. She knew the spider's web in
the south-west angle, by the holly-bush. She
was on speaking terms with the spider (a
monstrous glutton, who died at last of delirium
tremens, brought on by eating a bluebottle who
had tipsified himself with the saccharine fermentation
of fivepence-halfpenny moist, at a grocer's
shop in High-street Clapham, and so had staggered
to Stockwell, to be devoured, and die).
She knew that the spider did not always dwell
in his web, but that he lay in wait, sometimes, in
a little cavern or niche in the bricks, where a
French bean peg once had been.  The gravel of
the playground was familiar to her, and a thrill
of delight came over her when she found among
the pebbles one day, a broken shell.  She knew
all about the miniature allotment garden which
the most meritorious among the five-and-thirty
were permited to cultivate, and where they
cultivated mustard-and-cress, to be afterwards
consumed on half-holiday afternoons at tea-time—
mustard-and-cress which tasted as hot as ginger to
the tongue, and was rather uncomfortably gritty
to the teeth.  Into these garden-beds the young
ladies frequently emptied the proceeds of their
pocket-money, in the guise of small brown paper
packets of seeds, presumably containing the
germs of rare and gorgeous flowers, but which
generally ended in disappointment, coming up
in various forms of weediness or scrubbiness,
but never turning out to be geraniums, or
fuchsias, or anything practical.  Then, was there
not the speculative Miss Newton, who was
always planting acorns in the fond hope that
some time between their plantation and her going
home for the holidays they would sprout up into
giant oaks?  Was there not Miss Close, the
miserly boarder, who buried halfpence, nay
four-penny-pieces even, in her two flower plots?  And,
then, Miss Furblow, the draper's daughter, had a
dandy set of garden tools, all shining in iron and
newly-turned wood— tools which excited the
bitter envy of her companions, who had usually
about one half-toothless rake, and one bent spade
with a broken handle, to half a dozen horticulturists
— tools which she didn't know how to use,
and which brought her, at last, to signal grief
and mortification?

All these things were noted by Lily; likewise,
the grim little back door, fast bolted and barred,
which, in former times, had communicated with
Mr. Jagg's garden— the cross old gentleman next
door. That door was as much an object of
grave and wistful contemplation to Lily, as the
Debtors' door of Newgate is to some grown
people. Would it ever open? Why was it closed?
What was there behind it? Mr. Jagg hated the
Bunnycastles, and the Bunnycastles hated Mr.
Jagg. He spoke scornfully of the five-and-thirty
boarders as "a pack of young hussies," and spitefully
lopped off half the speading branches of
his best cherry-tree, because a bough overhung
the wall of the Bunnycastle playground.  Whereupon
Miss Celia Bunnycastle called in a cunning
worker in iron, and caused him to erect a formidable
palisade of spikes on the wall, as though
to repel any attempts at midnight escalade for
nefariously amative purposes by Jagg. Jagg
denied the legal right of the Bunnycastles to
erect this chevaux-de-frise. There was much
acrimonious correspondence; the solicitors of