, strangely enough, hell never
came into my dreamings except in the interesting shape it took in
"Paradise Lost." After reading that, the devil was to me no horned and
hoofed horror, but the beautiful shadowed archangel, and I always
hoped that Jesus, my ideal Prince, would save him in the end. The
things that really frightened me were vague, misty presences that I
felt were near, but could not see; they were so real that I knew just
where they were in the room, and the peculiar terror they excited lay
largely in the feeling that I was just going to see them. If by chance
I came across a ghost story it haunted me for months, for I saw
whatever unpleasant spectre was described; and there was one horrid
old woman in a tale by Sir Walter Scott, who glided up to the foot of
your bed and sprang on it in some eerie fashion and glared at you, and
who made my going to bed a terror to me for many weeks. I can still
recall the feeling so vividly that it almost frightens me now!

CHAPTER III.

GIRLHOOD.

In the spring of 1861 Miss Marryat announced her intention of going
abroad, and asked my dear mother to let me accompany her. A little
nephew whom she had adopted was suffering from cataract, and she
desired to place him under the care of the famous Duesseldorf oculist.
Amy Marryat had been recalled home soon after the death of her mother,
who had died in giving birth to the child adopted by Miss Marryat, and
named at her desire after her favourite brother Frederick (Captain
Marryat). Her place had been taken by a girl a few months older than
myself, Emma Mann, one of the daughters of a clergyman, who had
married Miss Stanley, closely related, indeed, if I remember rightly,
a sister of the Miss Mary Stanley who did such noble work in nursing
in the Crimea.

For some months we had been diligently studying German, for Miss
Marryat thought it wise that we should know a language fairly well
before we visited the country of which it was the native tongue. We
had been trained also to talk French daily during dinner, so we were
not quite "helpless foreigners" when we steamed away from St.
Catherine's Docks, and found ourselves on the following day in
Antwerp, amid what seemed to us a very Babel of conflicting tongues.
Alas for our carefully spoken French, articulated laboriously! We were
lost in that swirl of disputing luggage-porters, and could not
understand a word! But Miss Marryat was quite equal to the occasion,
being