ceived invitations from Mrs. Rowden to take tea in
the drawing-room with the lady parlor boarders, when my week's report
for "bonne conduite" had been tolerably satisfactory. One evening when I
had received this honorable distinction, and was sitting in sleepy
solemnity on the sofa, opposite my uncle John's black figure in
"Coriolanus," which seemed to grow alternately smaller and larger as my
eyelids slowly drew themselves together and suddenly opened wide, with a
startled consciousness of unworthy drowsiness, Miss H----, who was
sitting beside me, reading, leaned back and put her book before my face,
pointing with her finger to the lines--

"It is the hour when from the boughs
The nightingale's high note is heard."

It would be impossible to describe the emotion I experienced. I was
instantly wide awake, and, quivering with excitement, fastened a grip
like steel upon the book, imploring to be allowed to read on. The fear,
probably, of some altercation loud enough to excite attention to the
subject of her studies (which I rather think would not have been
approved of, even for a "parlor boarder") prevented Miss H---- from
making the resistance she should have made to my entreaties, and I was
allowed to leave the room, carrying with me the dangerous prize, which,
however, I did not profit by.

It was bedtime, and the dormitory light burned but while we performed
our night toilet, under supervision. The under teacher and the lamp
departed together, and I confided to the companion whose bed was next to
mine that I had a volume of Lord Byron under my pillow. The emphatic
whispered warnings of terror and dismay with which she received this
information, her horror at the wickedness of the book (of which of
course she knew nothing), her dread of the result of detection for me,
and her entreaties, enforced with tears, that I would not keep the
terrible volume where it was, at length, combined with my own nervous
excitement about it, affected me with such a sympathy of fear that I
jumped out of bed and thrust the fatal poems into the bowels of a straw
_paillasse_ on an empty bed, and returned to my own to remain awake
nearly all night. My study of Byron went no further then: the next
morning I found it impossible to rescue the book unobserved from its
hiding-place, and Miss H----, to whom I confided the secret of it, I
suppose took her own time for withdrawing it, and so I then read no more
of that wonderful poetry,