'Yes, even to the slightest hesitation, or even beginning a word twice. In order to fix our attention, we were strictly required to

look at Miss Cookham's nose.'

Mrs. Malcolm laughed heartily as she exclaimed

'I hope it was a handsome nose.'

'I have an impression that it was. I rather think it was what is called a cogitative nose; but all that I was ever conscious of in my intent gaze was the lesson I was repeating, and the danger of letting my eyes stray.'

'And were you so very anxious to be perfect in your lesson?' asked Mrs. Malcolm.

'Oh, yes; our rewards depended upon it. Quite perfect lessons and quite good behaviour all day gained a ticket, marked merit in black; and a certain number of black tickets were exchanged for a red one, and a certain number of red tickets gained one with merit in gold letters; and these golden tickets, as they were called, were rewarded with half-a-crown. But to give you an idea of the difficulty of obtaining the highest reward-I never gained but one half-crown all the time I was at school. I was fairly perfect in my lessons, but what with having to learn extra lessons for speaking ungrammatically, which kept us from any reward till they were repeated-or having to forfeit a ticket for some small delinquency, I was continually falling back just as I thought I had gained the coveted golden ticket, which was the first grand step towards the half-crown.'

'And now, just tell me candidly what good you could possibly have derived from all this petty and vain striving and struggling? How could it have been of any use, moral or intellectual, except just to dwarf your intellect and damp your energies?'

'It did to a certain extent, as you suggest, dwarf our intellects and damp our energies,' I replied. But it did something besides. It taught us perseverance, industry, and exactness; and you will acknowledge what valuable lessons these were. As the lessons were to be learnt word for word, and without the slightest hesitation, they had to be repeated again and again, and in consequence every fact was impressed upon the memory, so that it could not be forgotten. When the Catechism of History had been gone through once, it was begun again. The events and dates, meagre though they were, were fastened like nails into the brain; and upon them it was comparatively easy in after years to hang the more interesting details. The system was exaggerated, and even absurd in some respects; but I am heretic enough to believe that the plan often adopted of exciting children's historical interest by picturesque stories, without taking the trouble to make them master the dry skeleton of bare facts which must always be a mere matter of memory, will ultimately tend to produce confusion and superficiality. It is the difference between tossing down a heap of dresses on the floor, or ranging them on pegs.'

VOL. 29.

2

PART 169.

'But what was your own experience when you left Miss Cookham's?' said Mrs. Malcolm. 'What did you feel you had gained ? ' 'Before I left Miss Cookham's,' I said, 'I had gained first the most profound sense of my own ignorance. I had met with other children brought up on a different system, and had heard of their more advanced studies, and in consequence I felt very discontented. On one occasion I remember giving vent to the feeling at home. I said to a very clever uncle, who asked me about my school life, "I learn a great deal, and I say a great deal, but I don't understand it." The complaint was repeated to Miss Cookham, who was greatly annoyed, and showed it so plainly, that I took good care never to make any more observations upon the defects of my instruction. But the conviction of my own deficiency remained, and when my eldest sister and I went to another school, we both fully believed that we should disgrace ourselves by our ignorance. To our great surprise we found that we were considered more than on a par with the generality of girls of our own age. We spelt quite correctly; our handwriting, though unformed, was clear and neat. We read distinctly; we were perfectly well acquainted with the outlines of English History, including the dates and the genealogies; we had a general idea of geography, and understood a little of astronomy. We could work rules in arithmetic up to decimal fractions, and were absolutely perfect in the multiplication table. It is quite true that we had never heard of Romulus, much less of Pericles; that natural science was an unknown name; and although we could parse a sentence according to Lindley Murray, we had not the most remote idea of what was meant by analysis and derivations. But what we did know we knew absolutely. It was our own-a possession for life; and it has remained a possession. I say most earnestly that whatever may have been the advantages of my after education both at school and at home, they would all have been comparatively wasted but for the exact elementary lessons learnt at Miss Cookham's.'

'But you would not recommend us to go back to such a cramped system?' said Mrs. Malcolm.

'Of course not; any more than I would recommend a return to the stiff Sir and Madam of our ancestors, and the bowings and curtseyings of the minuet. I only want to recognise what was good in it, and by this to modify the new plans which I think often bring children forward rapidly at the expense of exactness, and confuse their minds by attempting too many subjects.'

'But are you quite correct in saying that the very limited instruction you received at Miss Cookham's was all the intellectual training you had till you were thirteen?'

'No, indeed; I should be most unmindful of my home influences if I made any such assertion. It was a remark which I read the other day, and which is confirmed by my own observation, that the difference

between the various grades of the educated classes, and which renders an imperfectly taught man of the world more socially influential than a certificated national schoolmaster, arises from the cultivated literary and artistic surroundings of his youth. The things which he has heard and seen, the conversations to which he has listened, the mere gossip of the dinner-table, have unconsciously widened his mind and enlarged his sphere of observation; and in this way I trace the fact, that when I left Miss Cookham's I was intellectually much beyond a child of thirteen who has been well taught at a national school, to the mental enlargement of my home.'

'I know you lived with clever people,' said Mrs. Malcolm, 'but you had very little time allowed you to profit by their society.'

'Very little-almost nothing, it would seem; but nevertheless my sister and I did profit by it; how, or when, or why, I cannot under. take to say. Cultivation and talent were in the atmosphere. We heard discussions upon political subjects when we came down to dessert, or dined with our parents and brothers, on certain days. There were arguments about quotations from classical authors; references were made to books; characters past and present were criticised. The subjects were very fragmentary, but children put things together and draw deductions in a way which their elders little suspect.' 'And then you had a good library,' said Mrs. Malcolm. My husband was speaking of it only yesterday, as being one of the choicest he had ever seen.'

6

'So choice, that we little girls were never allowed to do anything but look at the outsides of the books,' I said. 'We gained a profound respect for large paper copies and rare editions; but of the value of their contents we were ignorant.'

And did you never indulge your curiosity?' asked Mrs.

Malcolm.

'Never. You know we were trained to absolute obedience. And this dread of a child's touch when books were in question was a tradition in the family. We had an uncle who lived in the country, and had, like my father, a small but valuable library. Our holidays were often spent with him. His lovely little cottage was a delight to us. He was extremely indulgent, and we had the full freedom of the house and garden, and the use of everything except the books. He was accustomed to say that the moment a child's fingers had touched a book it was ruined. And in order to make the temptation to disobey less trying to us, he made a sacrifice of the two books which he thought would be most attractive. Glanville's History of Witches was given up to my brothers, and a beautifully bound edition of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments was delivered over to my sisters and myself. The Witches were considered immoral, and we girls never looked at them; but I confess that I much doubt whether the non-expurgated Arabian Nights, in which I revelled as I sat under the trees, with the

exquisite view of the sea and the opposite coast before me, was not the more dangerous of the two works. Anyhow, I am glad to think that the children of the present day need not wade through such an amount of moral mud to reach the islands of pure delight as I waded through when I read the Arabian Nights, till I knew them nearly by heart, and related them, when I had the opportunity, to my companions at school.' 'What, with Miss Cookham listening!' exclaimed Mrs. Malcolm. 'Not generally, but I remember one day, much to my terror, being called upon by Miss Cookham to repeat to her what I was telling; and I had to begin the story of the prince who climbed up the mountain, whilst the stones were reviling him, and was not allowed to reply to them on pain of being turned into a stone himself. It was too much, however, for Miss Cookham's imagination, and I had only a scolding for talking such nonsense.'

'Dreadful woman! She ought to have been scourged,' was Mrs. Malcolm's comment.

'Well,' I replied, laughing, 'she had some reason for being alarmed at my story-telling flights, for on another occasion I was seized upon in the same way, and was obliged to confess that I had been describing from my own invention a young lady who had all the luxuries of life at command, and amongst other things had a fireplace in her pocket to keep her warm. Poor Miss Cookham was thoroughly angry then, and I rather think she sent me to bed; and I am not at all sure that I did not deserve it for my want of common sense; at any rate, I know I was made ashamed of my folly, and kept within bounds for the future.'

'But, besides the Arabian Nights, you must surely have made ac. quaintance in some degree with the standard English authors,' said Mrs. Malcolm, 'if it were only by hearing them discussed?'

'I knew for the most part what they wrote about, and had my curiosity excited by quotations, and I was interested also in reading the titles of their works. There was a shabby edition of Shakespeare also, which was not forbidden; and a lovely edition of Thomson's Seasons, illustrated by good engravings, was shown to us occasionally as a treat. In fact we picked up literary information as fowls pick up corn at the barn door. Miss Cookham also had some curious old book and novels-but not sensation novels-which we were allowed to read, and which gave us food for thought. The Lollards was a delightful story, at least so I thought it at the time; and I waded through Miss Hawkins's clever and thoughtful, but very wordy and voluminous tales, Rosanne and The Countess and Gertrude, and upon the whole gained a great deal from them.'

'But those were the days of Walter Scott,' said Mrs. Malcolm; 'did he never cross your path?'

'Yes, indeed; but rather surreptitiously. A friend and former pupil of Miss Cookham's used sometimes to come and drink tea with us;

and before we children went to bed she would begin reading aloud for Miss Cookham's amusement without any reference to us. I heard the opening of The Talisman in this way, but was sent to bed before the reading was finished to dream of Sir Kenneth and Edith Plantagenet, and envy, as I have never envied since, the happy mortals who had the privilege of hearing the end.'

'But you might have got hold of the books in the holidays,' said Mrs. Malcolm.

'I believe I did, occasionally; but books were not to be obtained as easily then as they are now; and no one would have taken the trouble to provide the best novels of the day for the amusement of children. So we picked up just what we could get, and I daresay were not really the worse off for it.'

'I daresay not,' replied Mrs. Malcolm; 'I often think that what children in these educational days are apt to want is-what some one -I forget who-calls a little wholesome neglect. In your case, too, there must have been unconscious education from the number of persons, of different grades and circumstances, who, I have been told, frequented your house.'

'Yes, that was undoubtedly education in the sense of widening one's mind, and enlarging one's sympathies, and giving one an insight into character. So strange it is to me now to look back upon the life we little girls lived, with (as it was supposed) no ideas beyond the limits of the nursery, and Miss Cookham's school; whilst all the time we were really peering out, as it were, through the windows of our mind, and learning and making our observations about the great world beyond.'

'And making them correctly, I daresay,' said Mrs. Malcolm. 'Children's insights into character border on instinct. In this respect there is a curious likeness between them and the higher animals, especially dogs.'

'It was more than instinct,' I said; for we really did understand and reason upon what was said and done, when it was supposed we were merely thinking of our lessons or our play. Initials were often used in conversation instead of names, but we perfectly understood who were meant, and thus we estimated the family friends and acquaintances for the most part at what we found in after years was their just value. We recognised truly our exact social position and our surroundings; in fact, so well acquainted were we with what are called family affairs, that when we had grown up to womanhood no changes came to us as a surprise, or as if we were waked from a dream; we had been prepared, and we accepted them quietly.'

'I wonder whether that sort of thing is common,' said Mrs. Malcolm. 'My own life has been an even one. There was no world without me from which I was supposed to live apart, for I was myself the centre from being placed so early at the head of everything in the house, and having only my father to refer to.'