ars at Hanover, where he
was curator of the royal museum and had married a German wife, and had
among his most intimate friends and correspondents both the Grimms,
Gervinus, and many of the principal literary men of Germany. My sister
and myself, on the contrary, had remarkable facility in speaking foreign
languages with the accent and tune (if I may use the expression)
peculiar to each; a faculty which seems to me less the result of early
training and habit, than of some particular construction of ear and
throat favorable for receiving and repeating mere sounds; a musical
organization and mimetic faculty; a sort of mocking-bird specialty,
which I have known possessed in great perfection by persons with whom it
was in no way connected with the study, but only with the use of the
languages they spoke with such idiomatic ease and grace. Moreover, in my
own case, both in Italian and German, though I understand for the most
part what I read and what is said in these languages, I have had but
little exercise in speaking them, and have been amused to find myself,
while travelling, taken for an Italian as well as for a German, simply
by dint of the facility with which I imitated the accent of the people I
was among, while intrepidly confounding my moods, tenses, genders, and
cases in the determination to speak and make myself understood in the
language of whatever country I was passing through.

Mademoiselle Descuilles, Mrs. Rowden's partner, was a handsome woman of
about thirty, with a full, graceful figure, a pleasant countenance, a
great deal of playful vivacity of manner, and very determined and strict
notions of discipline. Active, energetic, intelligent, and
good-tempered, she was of a capital composition for a governess, the
sort of person to manage successfully all her pupils, and become an
object of enthusiastic devotion to the elder ones whom she admitted to
her companionship.

She almost always accompanied us when we walked, invariably presided in
the schoolroom, and very generally her eager figure and pleasant, bright
eyes were to be discovered in some corner of the playground, where, from
a semi-retirement, seated in her fauteuil with book or needlework in
hand, she exercised a quiet but effectual surveillance over her young
subjects.

She was the active and efficient partner in the concern, Mrs. Rowden the
dignified and representative one. The whole of our course of study and
mode of life, with the exception o