elementary instruction, but, for the rest, had no
more idea of lessons than of the Teeloogoo
language.

"That's right," quoth Barbara. "You'll have
plenty to learn while you're here, I can tell you.
Idleness is the parent of vice; and you'd better
be dead than a dunce. Above all, no crying—it's
wicked. Do you understand me?"

"Ess," replied Lily again, feeling that she was
called upon to say something, but understanding
about as much of the drift of the query as of the
primordial organisation of matter.

"Then, dry your eyes directly. You mustn't
look as if you were unhappy. Nobody is allowed
to be unhappy here. You're to be brought up
under the law of kindness. I've washed and
dressed you this morning, and, till you're able to
do it yourself, the servant will see after you.
I'm not a nurserymaid, understand that. Now,
come along."

"Ess," replied Lily again, bewildered between
the exposition of the law of kindness, and the
soap still smarting in the aqueous humours of
her eyes.

"Then, why don't you do as you're bidden?"
pursued Miss Barbara, giving a very slight
stamp with her foot.

Somehow, Lily couldn't do as she was bidden,
She was not naturally rebellious—only dismayed.
But, in her helplessness, and with this terrible
personage who spoke so sharply and scrubbed
so hard, hovering over her, an indefinable feeling
of insubordination took possession of her small
frame. She was a very tiny leveret to stand at
bay; but she clenched her fists, and crammed
them into her eyes, and, stammering out, "I
won't," sat down in the middle of the drugget;
and the rest was inarticulate moaning.

Here was a fine piece of work! The logical
Miss Barbara felt that it would be a lamentable
dereliction of the law of kindness to have recourse
to slapping; on the other hand, the child only
responded to commands by more passionate
outcries. So Miss Barbara took a middle course,
and, seizing the recalcitrant by one arm, shook
her.

"Will you come now, you aggravating little
thing?" she exclaimed.

The shaking was slight enough; but it was
quite sufficient to subdue the aggravating little
thing—she, who up to that moment, had never
had a finger laid upon her in anger. Miss Barbara
had not clutched her with any extraordinary
vigour; but she was muscular, and her fingers
had left faint red streaks on Lily's baby-flesh.
The child looked at these marks, and acknowledged
at once the presence of superior will, of
irresistible force. An extinguisher descended
quickly, and for good, on the flickering flame of
revolt. She gave in—rose—suffered Miss
Barbara to rearrange her rumpled frock—and
very meekly followed her down stairs, clinging
to the bombazine skirt of her instructress.

Miss Barbara Bunnycastle had, probably,
never perused the famous work on Education
written by Mr. John Locke, author of an Essay
on the Conduct of the Human Understanding,
in which that profound philosopher relates a
light-hearted anecdote of a lady—a most affable
maternal person, and an ornament to her sex, I
am sure—who whipped her little daughter on
her coming home from nurse, eight, times in
succession, in the course of one morning, before
she could subdue her obstinacy. "And, had she
stopped at the seventh whipping," opines the
grave Mr. Locke, "the child would have been
ruined." Fortunately, Lily's little outbreak
had been got under by the first overt act of
coercion. I am not prepared to surmise what
the result might have been after eight shakings.

So, down they went, passing through the
lavatory before mentioned, when two or three
lagging boarders, who had been late in obtaining
a hold on the jack-towels and the yellow soap,
or were still dallying with the comb-bag, or
vainly endeavouring to find eyes for their hooks,
fled, half unkempt, before Miss Bunnycastle's
face, like chaff before the wind. Then they
descended half a dozen break-neck stairs, and
leaving a lobby, hung with bags, and cloaks, and
playground hats and bonnets, behind them,
entered a long low whitewashed room, barely
furnished with desks painted black, and wooden
forms, and a few maps, and a closed bookcase
strongly resembling a meat-screen, and at the
upper end of which, at a raised rostrum, sat
Mrs. Bunnycastle, with a pile of open volumes
before her. She was supported on either side,
like her Majesty in the House of Lords, by lower
chairs of estate, occupied by Miss Celia and Miss
Adelaide Bunnycastle. The English and the
French governesses, or " teachers," as they were
less reverently called by the pupils, occupied
desks at the further end of the schoolroom,
and Miss Barbara had a kind of roving
commission all over the academic premises, to
inspect, to watch, to report, and to reprove. Her
eye was everywhere, and her body was in most
places.

It would seem that, on this particular morning,
the whole pomp and state of the establishment of
Rhododendron House had been brought out to
impress the new pupil—though she was such a
very little one—with a due sense of awe and
reverence. It was rarely, under ordinary
circumstances, that Mrs. Bunnycastle made her
appearance in the schoolroom until after breakfast;
and as seldom did more than two of the
sisters deign to attend the earliest assembly of
the pupils. However, on the first appearance of
Lily in the schoolroom, she found herself face to
face with the whole dread hierarchy of her future
home to say nothing of the five-and-thirty
boarders sitting at their desks, whose gaze
appeared to be directed towards Miss Floris
with the concentrated force of one eye.

"Don't stare about you so," whispered Miss
Barbara to Lily; she had to stoop a long way
down to whisper. "Little girls shouldn't stare.