iss Jane Wackles; corporal punishment,
fasting, and other tortures and terrors, by Mrs Wackles. Miss Melissa
Wackles was the eldest daughter, Miss Sophy the next, and Miss Jane the
youngest. Miss Melissa might have seen five-and-thirty summers or
thereabouts, and verged on the autumnal; Miss Sophy was a fresh, good
humoured, buxom girl of twenty; and Miss Jane numbered scarcely sixteen
years. Mrs Wackles was an excellent but rather venomous old lady of
three-score.

To this Ladies' Seminary, then, Richard Swiveller hied, with designs
obnoxious to the peace of the fair Sophia, who, arrayed in virgin
white, embellished by no ornament but one blushing rose, received him
on his arrival, in the midst of very elegant not to say brilliant
preparations; such as the embellishment of the room with the little
flower-pots which always stood on the window-sill outside, save in
windy weather when they blew into the area; the choice attire of the
day-scholars who were allowed to grace the festival; the unwonted curls
of Miss Jane Wackles who had kept her head during the whole of the
preceding day screwed up tight in a yellow play-bill; and the solemn
gentility and stately bearing of the old lady and her eldest daughter,
which struck Mr Swiveller as being uncommon but made no further
impression upon him.

The truth is--and, as there is no accounting for tastes, even a taste
so strange as this may be recorded without being looked upon as a
wilful and malicious invention--the truth is that neither Mrs Wackles
nor her eldest daughter had at any time greatly favoured the
pretensions of Mr Swiveller, being accustomed to make slight mention of
him as 'a gay young man' and to sigh and shake their heads ominously
whenever his name was mentioned. Mr Swiveller's conduct in respect to
Miss Sophy having been of that vague and dilatory kind which is usually
looked upon as betokening no fixed matrimonial intentions, the young
lady herself began in course of time to deem it highly desirable, that
it should be brought to an issue one way or other. Hence she had at
last consented to play off against Richard Swiveller a stricken
market-gardner known to be ready with his offer on the smallest
encouragement, and hence--as this occasion had been specially assigned
for the purpose--that great anxiety on her part for Richard Swiveller's
presence which had occasioned her to leave the note he has ben seen to
receive. 'If he has any expectations at all or any