the rudiments of French. She was barely five feet in height, and as
thin and dry as an insect; and although her personal character came up
to any eulogium that could be pronounced upon it, her ignorance of the
"branches" specified was, if possible, greater than our own. She was
particularly perplexed by geometry; she aroused our hilarity by always
calling a parallelogram a parallel-O-gram, with a strong emphasis on
the penultimate syllable; and she spent several days repeating over to
herself, with a mystified countenance, the famous words, "The square
of the hypothenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two legs."
What were legs of a triangle, and how, if there were any, could they be
square? She never solved this enigma; and although we liked little Miss
Brown very much, she speedily lost all shadow of control over us; we
treated her as a sort of inferior sister, and would never be serious.
"English governess" became for us a synonym for an amiable little
nonentity who knew nothing; and I was surprised to learn, later, from
the early works of Miss Rhoda Broughton, that they could be beautiful
and intelligent. Miss Brown did not outlast our residence in Southport.

From Southport we removed to Manchester, and thence, after exhausting
the exposition, to Leamington, where we spent September and October of
1857. We expected to proceed direct from Leamington to France and Italy,
but we were destined to be delayed in London till January of 1858.

It was in Leamington that we were joined by Ada Shepard. She was a
graduate of Antioch, a men-and-women's college in Ohio, renowned in its
day, when all manner of improvements in the human race were anticipated
from educating the sexes together. Miss Shepard had got a very
thorough education there, so that she knew as much as a professor,
including--what would be of especial service to us--a knowledge of most
of the modern European languages. What seemed, no doubt, of even more
importance to her was her betrothal to her classmate, Henry Clay Badger;
they were to be married on her return to America. Meanwhile, as a matter
of mutual convenience (which rapidly became mutual pleasure), she was
to act as governess of us children and accompany our travels. Ada (as my
father and mother presently called her) was then about twenty-two years
old; she had injured her constitution--never robust--by addiction to
learning, and had incidentally imbibed from the atmosphere of Antioch
all t