gh she declares that at the time she could never keep him out of her
head--that if she had met him thirty-four successive times on the
Esplanade, she would have borne no small amount of torture to earn the
privilege of one more turn to meet him for the thirty-fifth--and that
her rest was broken by waking dreams of the possible misfortunes which
might account for his (and the dog's) obvious melancholy, and of
impossible circumstances in which she should act as their good angel and
deliverer.

At the time she kept her own counsel, and it was not because she had
ever heard of the weird-eyed gentleman and his deerhound that Mrs.
Minchin concluded her advice to Aunt Theresa on one occasion by a shower
of nods which nearly shook the poppies out of her bonnet, and the
oracular utterance--"She's got some nonsense or other into her head,
depend upon it. Send her to school!"

One thing has often struck me in reading the biographies of great
people. They must have to be written in quite a different way to the
biographies of common people like ourselves.

For instance, when a practised writer is speaking of the early days of
celebrated poets, he says quite gravely--"Like Byron, Scott, and other
illustrious men, Hogg (the Ettrick shepherd) fell in love in his very
early childhood." And of course it sounds better than if one said, "Like
Smith, and Brown, and Jones, and nine out of every ten children, he did
not wait for years of discretion to make a fool of himself."

Not being illustrious, Matilda blushes to remember this early folly; and
not being a poet's biographer, Aunt Theresa said in a severe voice, for
the general behoof of the school-room, that "Little girls were sometimes
very silly, and got a great deal of nonsense into their heads." I do not
think it ever dawned upon her mind that girls' heads not being
jam-pots--which if you do not fill them will remain empty--the best way
to keep folly out was to put something less foolish in.

She would have taken a great deal of trouble that her daughters might
not be a flounce behind the fashions, and was so far-seeing in her
motherly anxieties, that she junketed herself and Major Buller to many
an entertainment, where they were bored for their pains, that an
extensive acquaintance might ensure to the girls partners, both for
balls and for life when they came to require them. But after what
fashion their fancies should be shaped, or whether they had wholesome
food and tender tra