ng, who have borne them with a
mother's throes, watched over them with a mother's anxious mind, and
reared them with a mother's ardent love, are considered to be wholly
incompetent, in the opinion of these desiccated and barren branches of
nature's stupendous, ever-bearing tree.

Mrs Beazeley, who had lost her husband soon after marriage, was not
fond of children, as they interfered with her habits of extreme
neatness. As far as Amber's education was concerned, all we can say is,
that if the old housekeeper did her no good, she certainly did her no
harm. As Amber increased in years and intelligence, so did her thirst
for knowledge on topics upon which Mrs Beazeley was unable to give her
any correct information. Under these circumstances, when applied to,
Mrs Beazeley, who was too conscious to mislead the child, was
accustomed to place her hand upon her back, and complain of the
rheumatiz--"Such a stitch, my dear love, can't talk now--ask your pa'
when he comes home."

Edward Forster had maturely weighed the difficulties of the charge
imposed upon him, that of educating a female. The peculiarity of her
situation, without a friend in the wide world except himself; and his
days, in all probability, numbered to that period at which she would
most require an adviser--that period, when the heart rebels against the
head, and too often overthrows the legitimate dynasty of reason,
determined him to give a masculine character to her education, as most
likely to prove the surest safeguard through a deceitful world.

Aware that more knowledge is to be imparted to a child by conversation
than by any other means (for by this system education is divested of its
drudgery), during the first six years of her life Amber knew little more
than the letters of the alphabet. It was not until her desire of
information was excited to such a degree as to render her anxious to
obtain her own means of acquiring it that Amber was taught to read; and
then it was at her own request. Edward Forster was aware that a child
of six years old, willing to learn, would soon pass by another who had
been drilled to it at an earlier age and against its will, and whose
mind had been checked in its expansive powers by the weight which
constantly oppressed its infant memory. Until the above age the mind of
Amber had been permitted to run as unconfined through its own little
regions of fancy as her active body had been allowed to spring up the
adjacent hil