was erected, and this, together with the
steps that led to it, was carpeted with crimson, and adorned with a
profusion of flowers. One of the dignified personages, seated around a
table on which the books designed for prizes were exhibited, pronounced
a discourse commendatory of past efforts and hortatory to future ones,
and the pupils, all _en grande toilette_, and seated on benches facing
the stage, were summoned through the rows of admiring parents, friends,
acquaintances, and other invited guests, to receive the prizes awarded
for excellence in the various branches of our small curriculum. I was
the youngest girl in the school, but I was a quick, clever child, and a
lady, a friend of my family, who was present, told me many years after,
how well she remembered the frequent summons to the dais received by a
small, black-eyed damsel, the _cadette_ of the establishment. I have
considerable doubt that any good purpose could be answered by this
public appeal to the emulation of a parcel of school-girls; but I have
no doubt at all that abundant seeds of vanity, self-love, and love of
display, were sown by it, which bore their bad harvest many a long year
after.

I left Boulogne when I was almost nine years old, and returned home,
where I remained upwards of two years before being again sent to school.
During this time we lived chiefly at a place called Craven Hill,
Bayswater, where we occupied at different periods three different
houses.

My mother always had a detestation of London, which I have cordially
inherited. The dense, heavy atmosphere, compounded of smoke and fog,
painfully affected her breathing and oppressed her spirits; and the
deafening clangor of its ceaseless uproar irritated her nerves and
distressed her in a manner which I invariably experience whenever I am
compelled to pass any time in that huge Hubbub. She perpetually yearned
for the fresh air and the quiet of the country. Occupied as my father
was, however, this was an impossible luxury; and my poor mother escaped
as far as her circumstances would allow from London, and towards the
country, by fixing her home at the place I have mentioned. In those days
Tyburnia did not exist; nor all the vast region of Paddingtonian London.
Tyburn turnpike, of nefarious memory, still stood at the junction of
Oxford Road and the Edgeware Road, and between the latter and Bayswater
open fields traversed by the canal, with here and there an isolated
cottage dotted ab