o room
for competition; all was complacency and good humour on my part, and
affectionate gratitude, tempered with respect, on hers. But here I had
full room to shew courtesy, to affect those graces--to imitate that
elegance of manners practised by lady Harriot to their mothers. I was
to be their instructress in action and in attitudes, and to receive
their praises and their admiration of my theatrical genius. It was a
new scene of triumph for me, and I might then be said to be in the
very height of my glory.

If the plot of my piece, for the invention of which they so highly
praised me, had been indeed my own, all would have been well; but
unhappily I borrowed from a source which made my drama end far
differently from what I intended it should. In the catastrophe I lost
not only the name I personated in the piece, but with it my own name
also; and all my rank and consequence in the world fled from me for
ever.--My father presented me with a beautiful writing-desk for the
use of my new authorship. My silver standish was placed upon it; a
quire of gilt paper was before me. I took out a parcel of my best crow
quills, and down I sate in the greatest form imaginable.

I conjecture I have no talent for invention; certain it is that when I
sate down to compose my piece, no story would come into my head, but
the story which Ann had so lately related to me. Many sheets were
scrawled over in vain, I could think of nothing else; still the babies
and the nurse were before me in all the minutiae of description Ann
had given them. The costly attire of the lady-babe,--the homely garb
of the cottage-infant,--the affecting address of the fond mother to
her own offspring;--then the charming equivoque in the change of
the children: it all looked so dramatic:--it was a play ready made
to my hands. The invalid mother would form the pathetic, the silly
exclamations of the servants the ludicrous, and the nurse was nature
itself. It is true I had a few scruples, that it might, should it
come to the knowledge of Ann, be construed into something very like
a breach of confidence. But she was at home, and might never happen
to hear of the subject of my piece, and if she did, why it was only
making some handsome apology.--To a dependant companion, to whom I
had been so very great a friend, it was not necessary to be so very
particular about such a trifle.

Thus I reasoned as I wrote my drama, beginning with the title, which
I called "The Change