the malevolent Smiler, giving a turn to the
conversation.

  "My papa's a judge, and is the head of a
district twice as big again as Yorkshire," resumed
Miss Dallwallah, with tranquil dignity.

And, forthwith, all the young ladies plunged
into emulous vauntings of their respective
parentage, as is the custom of young ladies,
and middle-aged ladies, and old ladies— to say
nothing of gentlemen— with or without
encouragment; and when we are old, and can
no longer brag of our parents, we brag of our
children, or, haply, being celibate, of our parrots
or our lapdogs, our port or our pictures. And
so the world goes.

  Miss Tallboys, whose Christian name was
Grace, and who was a slender and elegant
blonde; Miss Dallwallah, otherwise Juggernaut,
otherwise the Begum, otherwise Lallah Rookh,
otherwise the Sultana Scheherazade, otherwise
a hundred other fantastic sobriquets culled from
Oriental sources, and sportively bestowed upon
her by her comrades, who loved her very dearly
when she did not bite; and Miss Thrupp, whose
parents were commercial (Thrupp and Calliper,
shipbrokers, Mincing-lane), who was nearly
sixteen, and who was amiable, but afflicted with
red hair; were the three senior pupils in
Rhododendron House. Their relatives were all
wealthy, and they were, consequently, held in
much consideration by the Bunnycastles. They
did pretty much as they liked. They "studied"
instead of learning lessons, and filled exercise-books
with indifferent caligraphy, instead of
repeating set tasks. They had masters for all
the accomplishments, and acquired as many, or
as few of them, as senior pupils at middle-class
schools— remember, I am writing of the
ante-"college" period— generally do. They spent
their liberal allowance of pocket-money as they
chose; and I hope young ladies, who have left
school, will not accuse me of libelling their sex,
when I record that the major portion of their
revenues went in sweetstuff. Now and then, a
servant-maid was bribed to smuggle in a novel
from the circulating library; but, as a rule, a
plentiful supply of almond rock, chocolate drops,
and candied horehound, was held to be a more
satisfactory pabulum than sentiment in three
volumes. At happy sixteen, a girl can dream
novels, and invent a hero every five minutes;
but it is not enough to dream of almond rock.
Sweetstuff is a thing that must be bought.

Mesdemoiselles Tallboys, Thrupp, and
Dallwallah, then, condescended to take into high
favour and affection the little girl who was left,
quite alone, in that scholastic desert. They
made a pet and a plaything of Lily Floris. Had
she been a little pauper, her pretty face, guileless
heart, and winning ways, would have made
her a favourite, even with the workhouse matron;
but Mrs. Bunnycastle's parlour-boarders were
predisposed in favour of the baby pupil by
mysterious hints from Miss Barbara, who, in her
occasional unbosoming of gossiping confidence
with the seniors, was wont to descant upon the
very grand folks whom she imagined Lily's
parents to be. The dazzling diamonds, and
scarcely less dazzling teeth, of Mr. Blunt, were
still fresh in Miss Bunnycastle's recollection,
and she gave the daughter of the possessor of
those valuables full credit for them. Miss
Barbara's unbosomings were quite enough to
make Lily, in the eyes of Miss Tallboys and her
companions, a little heroine. There was something
mysterious about her, they were glad to
recognise. She might be a nobleman's daughter;
the offspring, perchance, of a foreign prince.
She could tell nothing about her mamma. Poor,
little, deserted innocent. They saw it all. A
forced marriage; an infant torn away from her
agonised parent; an obscure retreat found for
the heiress of perhaps boundless domains! They
wanted fewer three volume novels smuggled in
from the circulating library than ever, for Lily
was a whole cabinet library of fiction in herself.
But, if they required less romance, they
stood in need of more sweetstuff, for they had
now an associate to share it. The three
friends solemnly adopted Lily, and at once
proceeded to make much of her, to the no small
content of the ruling powers, who, as the child
was too small to stand up in a class, and was
occasionally, though not often, given to fretting
if no notice were taken of her, were sometimes
puzzled to know where and how to bestow her.
Lily profited, not only physically, but
intellectually, by the patronage of the "great girls,"
as the three redoubtable parlour-boarders were
called; for Miss Tallboys, shocked at her
backwardness, began to teach her in earnest, and
before she had been at Rhododendron House a
year, had contrived, by kindness and caresses, to
instil into her a very fair acquaintance with
great A, and little a, and words in one syllable.
Miss Thrupp must needs undertake to teach
the mite of a thing to dance, which means
that she romped about with her in most madcap
fashion; and, confident of her educational
mission, gravely proclaimed that she was about
to "ground her" on the piano. A great
many music-books, and a backgammon-board,
falsely purporting to be Hume's History of
England, had to be piled on the stool before
Lily, mounted thereupon, could get her plump
hands on a proper level with the keyboard of the
rickety old practising piano (Popkinson, Great
Swallow-street, Oxford-street, 1809), and her
"grounding" did not extend beyond her being
allowed to thump the keys, which were worn,
and dented, and yellow, like the teeth of an old
horse, till she began to crow with delight at the
noise she made, or her instructress, laughing,
and stopping her ears at the din— though a
quarter of the battered clefs were dumb— bade
her, with a kiss, desist. As for the Begum,
Juggernaut was not behindhand in activity of
patronage to the little darling. She hung
strange ornaments of golden filigree round her
neck. I believe she would have pierced her