or after
repeating "She's going to-day!" in a tone more befitting the Litany, he
looked hard in my face for direction as to how the situation was to be
taken. But I crossly bade him look sharp and say his prayers and not
bother me. What could this gloom portend, that on a day of days like the
present seemed to hang my heavens with black?

Down at last and out in the sun, we found Edward before us, swinging on
a gate, and chanting a farm-yard ditty in which all the beasts appear
in due order, jargoning in their several tongues, and every verse begins
with the couplet--

"Now, my lads, come with me,
Out in the morning early!"

The fateful exodus of the day had evidently slipped his memory entirely.
I touched him on the shoulder. "She's going to-day!" I said. Edward's
carol subsided like a water-tap turned off. "So she is!" he replied,
and got down at once off the gate: and we returned to the house without
another word.

At breakfast Miss Smedley behaved in a most mean and uncalled-for
manner. The right divine of governesses to govern wrong includes no
right to cry. In thus usurping the prerogative of their victims, they
ignore the rules of the ring, and hit below the belt. Charlotte was
crying, of course; but that counted for nothing. Charlotte even cried
when the pigs' noses were ringed in due season; thereby evoking the
cheery contempt of the operators, who asserted they liked it, and
doubtless knew. But when the cloud-compeller, her bolts laid aside,
resorted to tears, mutinous humanity had a right to feel aggrieved, and
placed in a false and difficult position. What would the Romans have
done, supposing Hannibal had cried? History has not even considered the
possibility. Rules and precedents should be strictly observed on both
sides; when they are violated, the other party is justified in feeling
injured.

There were no lessons that morning, naturally--another grievance!

The fitness of things required that we should have struggled to the last
in a confused medley of moods and tenses, and parted for ever, flushed
with hatred, over the dismembered corpse of the multiplication table.
But this thing was not to be; and I was free to stroll by myself
through the garden, and combat, as best I might, this growing feeling of
depression. It was a wrong system altogether, I thought, this going of
people one had got used to. Things ought always to continue as they had
been. Change there must be,