t now of children's dolls, and of the manner in which
those little people take up and neglect their darling toys, and very
likely this history will show that Miss Blanche assumed and put away
her live dolls with a similar girlish inconstancy. She had had hosts of
dear, dear, darling, friends ere now, and had quite a little museum
of locks of hair in her treasure-chest, which she had gathered in the
course of her sentimental progress. Some dear friends had married: some
had gone to other schools: one beloved sister she had lost from the
pension, and found again, O, horror! her darling, her Leocadie keeping
the books in her father's shop, a grocer in the Rue du Bac: in fact,
she had met with a number of disappointments, estrangements,
disillusionments, as she called them in her pretty French jargon, and
had seen and suffered a great deal for so young a woman. But it is
the lot of sensibility to suffer, and of confiding tenderness to be
deceived, and she felt that she was only undergoing the penalties of
genius in these pangs and disappointments of her young career.

Meanwhile, she managed to make the honest lady, her mother, as
uncomfortable as circumstances would permit; and caused her worthy
stepfather to wish she was dead. With the exception of Captain Strong,
whose invincible good-humour was proof against her sarcasms, the little
lady ruled the whole house with he tongue. If Lady Clavering talked
about Sparrowgrass instead of Asparagus, or called an object a hobject,
as this unfortunate lady would sometimes do, Missy calmly corrected
her, and frightened the good soul, her mother, into errors only the more
frequent as she grew more nervous under her daughter's eye.

It is not to be supposed, considering the vast interest which the
arrival of the family at Clavering Park inspired in the inhabitants
of the little town, that Madame Fribsby alone, of all the folks in
Clavering, should have remained unmoved and incurious. At the first
appearance of the Park family in church, Madame noted every article of
toilette which the ladies wore, from their bonnets to their brodequins,
and took a survey of the attire of the ladies' maids in the pew allotted
to them. We fear that Doctor Portman's sermon, though it was one of
his oldest and most valued compositions, had little effect upon Madame
Fribsby on that day.

In a very few days afterwards, she had managed for herself an interview
with Lady Clavering's confidential attendant in