battered, noisy, disreputable old school-room at Silverbridge? The door opens, and Miss Tyburn enters, stately, imposing, grave. She scans me so closely as she takes my hand that I feel she is reading to the very bottom of my soul. While she talks to mother I study her face, which is an uncommon one: command sits on her forehead; intellect and power look out of her eyes: upon her lips passion and will have set their seal; over the whole countenance, and in the marvellously, perfectly formed head, is a remarkable air of penetration, determination, and clear common sense. Presently she asks mother if she would like to see the dormitories and schools, and we follow her along a glass corridor and into a dining-room, vast and square, with three large windows. The walls are hung with busts of Homer, Aristotle, Cicero, and all the grand old poets, senators, and orators. Over the mantelpiece hangs a picture of St. John and the Lamb painted in oils. We go through endless school and class-rooms, filled with girls who look with some astonishment at me as I walk behind my elders, and so upstairs to the dormitories, which are long and wide, with windows on both sides, and partitioned off into narrow bedrooms just large enough to contain a bed and a small square box, while a curtained shelf runs across from one side to the other exactly above the bed, and a thick curtain closes in the room at the entrance. We go downstairs again, and very soon mother takes her departure. She is going to sleep the night at the house of a friend who lives twenty miles away. Oh, mother! mother! as you drive away do you know what a wretched, wretched child you leave behind?
Ay! she knows, and her heart is every whit as heavy as mine. I am too much in awe of Miss Tyburn to do more than sniff noiselessly after mother goes; besides, I have literally no tears left. One can be sorrier, I am sure, when one's eyes are dry than when they are wet. Miss Tyburn speaks to me kindly—indeed I am a spectacle that might move any one to compassion—and
