hungry; and though the sun, in his back
parlour, hearing her sobbing, looked up from
his ledger, and opening a casement drove a
lively bearn across her bed, she was inconsolable,
now, and wept with unassuageable bitterness.

All at once there came a dreadful bell. It
must have been made of Chinese gongs, melted
down with revolutionary tocsins, fire-alarums,
jarring chimes from brick chapels in grim towns
of the shoddy country, peals from jails and
workhouses, bells from men-o'-war where discipline
was rigid, and whose captains were Tartars:
the whole hung in the Tower of Babel, furnished
with a clapper forged from Xantippe's tongue,
and finally cracked and flawed under the especial
auspices of Mr. Denison, Q.C. It was a most
appalling bell. It elected, first, to creak and
groan, and then to emit a frightful rasping
clangour that set your teeth on edge, and made
your bosom's lord sit so uneasily on his throne
as to seem in danger of tumbling off. You
could hear the duller sound of the tugging at the
rope, and the thud of the outer rim of the bell
against the brick wall by the side of which it was
hung, besides the persistent bang, bang, banging
of the clapper itself. It was a campanile of evil
omen, a sound of doom, a most abominable
bell the—school-bell of Rhododendron House.

The five-and-thirty boarders in Rhododendron
House knew well enough, from long and sad
experience, what the bell meant. It signified
Get up! Get up this minute! Get up this
instant! Get up, you lazy little minxes, under
pain of ever so many bad marks, extra lessons,
and diminished rations of bread-and-butter!
So, sluggishly or speedily, but still inevitably,
the pupils proceeded to rise, to dress, and to
lave themselves. All of these processes were ill
done; and at prayer-time, few of the five-and-
thirty were more than half-dressed, half-washed,
or half-awake. But they were all there.

To poor little Lily the bell represented only
so much deafening noise, mingled with some
vague and indefinite menace of she knew not
what. It made her cry more than aught else
that had previously excited her emotion; and if,
at the end of five minutes, or thereabouts, the
horrible instrument had not surceased in its
uproar, it is not at all out of the range of proba-
bility that the terrified child might have screamed
herself into a fit.

"Hoity-toity!" quoth Miss Barbara
Bunnycastle, entering the room at this juncture,
"what's all this noise about? No crying
allowed here, Miss Floris. You should have,
been up and dressed half an hour ago, little
one."

She was quite another Miss Barbara Bunnycastle
to the young lady who had received
Lily the night before. Her voice was sharper,
her gait firmer, her manner more determined.
She seemed to forget that there were any such
persons as parents, and spoke only to pupils.
Cake and wine existed no more in her allure;
she was suggestive only of bread and scrape and
sky-blue. The holidays were a million miles,
and ten centuries, away. She was not cruel,
only cross; not severe, only strict. She was
still the guide, philosopher, and friend of her
young charges; but she was, above all, their
governess.

Miss Barbara had at first some difficulty in
reconciling herself to the gross infraction of
scholastic discipline committed by a young
lady-boarder, who had not only neglected to leave
her couch at the first sound of the " getting-up
bell," and apparel herself in her every-day
garments, but was also so ignorant of the arts of
the toilette as to be behindhand in reaching the
dingy corridor, dignified with the name of a
lavatory, where the five-and-thirty matutinally
fought for the possession of two jack-towels and
three squares of yellow soap. Miss Floris was
not even competent to hook-and-eye another
young lady's frock, or entreat her, in return, to
tie her pinafore. What was to be done with a
pupil who could not even part her hair, and knew
nothing of the proper maintenance of a comb
bag? But, by degrees, it dawned on Miss
Barbara that Lily Floris was a very little, little
child—a mere baby, in fact—and that there was
plenty of time to break her into the manége
pursued at the Stockwell academy of female
equitation. Even the education of Adelaide and
Theodora, those paragons of judicious training,
must have had a beginning. Next, it occurred
to Miss Barbara that the little one represented
so much good money, already paid in her behalf,
and that she might be made to represent much
more, equally good. Accordingly, bowing to the
force of circumstances, she shrugged the shoulders
of her mind, and concluded that the affair,
although dreadfully irregular, must be made the
best of; and, in pursuance of this sage resolve,
she condescended to order up Miss Floris's trunk,
and to array the new inmate in the garments
provided for her. Nay, she even went so far as
to take soap and towel in hand, and to frictionise
and slouch, in alternate douches and dry rubs,
the face and hands of her protégée.

Lily felt more alone than ever. She missed
the warm bath, the soft sponge, the soothing
words and merry tales, with which her old nurse
used to make the ordeal of the tub tolerable.
Now, the tub was replaced by the servant-girl's
wash-hand basin, a fictile bowl of many cracks,
not much bigger than a pie-dish. She was
dreadfully afraid—she knew not why — of her
instructress; but she could not subdue a stifled
sobbing. When, addled to anguish of mind, you
happen to have some soap in your eyes, it is hard
to refrain from lamentation.

Miss Barbara observed the child's grief, and,
as she washed her, chid her.

"You mustn't cry," she said, sharply. "It's
wrong, and foolish; and, besides, it'll prevent
your learning your lessons. Do you know what
it is to learn lessons?"

"Ess," replied Lily, who had once or twice
essayed to put a doll through a course of