friend:--"It's no an easy thing, Mem, for a woman to go through
the world _without a head_," _i.e._, single and unprotected.

From some unexplained cause, Miss Bond's patronage never reached me. I
am sure the good lady intended giving me lessons in both drawing and
composition; for she had said it, and her heart was a kind one; but then
her time was too much occupied to admit of her devoting an occasional
hour to myself alone; and as for introducing me to her young-lady
classes, in my rough garments, ever greatly improved the wrong way by my
explorations in the ebb and the peat-moss, and frayed, at times, beyond
even my mother's ability of repair, by warping to the tops of great
trees, and by feats as a cragsman--that would have been a piece of
Jack-Cadeism, on which, then or now, no village governess could have
ventured. And so I was left to get on in verse and picture-making quite
in the wild way, without care or culture.

My schoolfellows liked my stories well enough--better at least, on most
occasions, than they did the lessons of the master; but, beyond the
common ground of enjoyment which these extempore compositions furnished
to both the "sennachie" and his auditors, our tracts of amusement lay
widely apart. I disliked, as I have said, the yearly cock-fight--found
no pleasure in cat-killing, or in teasing at nights, or on the street,
the cross-tempered, half-witted _eccentrics_ of the village--usually
kept aloof from the ordinary play-grounds, and very rarely mingled in
the old hereditary games. On the other hand, with the exception of my
little friend of the cave, who, even after that disastrous incident,
evinced a tendency to trust and follow me as implicitly as before, my
schoolmates cared as little for my amusements as I did for theirs; and,
having the majority on their side, they of course voted mine to be the
foolish ones. And certainly a run of ill-luck followed me in my sports
about this time, that did give some show of reason to their decision.

In the course of my book-hunting, I had fallen in with two old-fashioned
military treatises, part of the small library of a retired officer
lately deceased, of which the one entitled the "Military Medley,"
discussed the whole art of marshalling troops, and contained numerous
plans, neatly coloured, of battalions drawn up in all possible forms, to
meet all possible exigencies; while the other, which also abounded in
prints, treated of the noble science of fortif