with due encouragement, and I should have had the pleasure of introducing Messrs. Percy and West into the very best society, and recording all their sayings and doings in double-columned close-printed pages....  I recollect, when I was a child, getting hold of some antiquated volumes, and reading them by stealth with the most exquisite pleasure.  You give a correct description of the patient Grisels of those days.  My aunt was one of them; and to this day she thinks the tales of the Ladies’ Magazine infinitely superior to any trash of modern literature.  So do I; for I read them in childhood, and childhood has a very strong faculty of admiration, but a very weak one of criticism....  I am pleased that you cannot quite decide whether I am an attorney’s clerk or a novel-reading dressmaker.  I will not help you at all in the discovery; and as to my handwriting, or the ladylike touches in my style and imagery, you must not draw any conclusion from that—­I may employ an amanuensis.  Seriously, sir, I am very much obliged to you for your kind and candid letter.  I almost wonder you took the trouble to read and notice the novelette of an anonymous scribe, who had not even the manners to tell you whether he was a man or a woman, or whether his ‘C.T.’ meant Charles Timms or Charlotte Tomkins.

TO A FRIEND

At school abroad

Brussels [c. May 1842].

I was twenty-six years old a week or two since; and at this ripe time of life I am a school-girl, and, on the whole, very happy in that capacity.  It felt very strange at first to submit to authority instead of exercising it—­to obey orders instead of giving them; but I like that state of things.  I returned to it with the same avidity that a cow, that has long been kept on dry hay, returns to fresh grass.  Don’t laugh at my simile.  It is natural to me to submit, and very unnatural to command.

This is a large school, in which there are about forty externes, or day-pupils, and twelve pensionnaires, or boarders.  Madame Heger, the head, is a lady of precisely the same cast of mind, degree of cultivation, and quality of intellect as Miss ——.  I think the severe points are a little softened, because she has not been disappointed, and consequently soured.  In a word, she is a married instead of a maiden lady.  There are three teachers in the school—­Mademoiselle Blanche, Mademoiselle Sophie, and Mademoiselle Marie.  The two first have no particular character.  One is an old maid, and the other will be one.  Mademoiselle Marie is talented and original, but of repulsive and arbitrary manners, which have made the whole school, except myself and Emily, her bitter enemies.  No less than seven masters attend, to teach the different branches of education—­French, Drawing, Music, Singing, Writing, Arithmetic, and German.  All in the house are Catholics except ourselves, one other girl, and the gouvernante of Madame’s children,