in Bloomsbury Square. Captain Paulby was our guardian—a tall, bony, unsympathetic widower—who governed his house as though it had been a regiment of soldiers. A scale of dietary was hung up in the nursery, and from it one learnt how many quarter-ounces of cocoa, how many half pounds of bread, and how many tablespoonfuls of arrowroot we consumed in the week. An order-book was brought into the nursery every morning, in which the detail of the day's duties was carefully set out, and to the instructions it contained implicit and unmurmuring obedience was exacted. It regulated the hours of rising and going to bed, the school hours and the hours of relaxation, when and where we were to walk, and what we were to wear.
We were placed in charge of a nurse—Nurse Starke—a tall, muscular, hardened woman of forty. She had a stern unrelenting face, close lips, hard grey eyes, and a certain smooth roundness of figure, which on looking back, suggests the idea of her having been turned in a lathe. I never see the masculine old woman who lets lodgings in a pantomime without thinking of Nurse Starke. I am bound to say, however, that she was scrupulously, indeed aggravatingly, clean and neat, and in that respect of course, the analogy falls to the ground.
Nurse Starke was not actively unkind to us. Indeed, I believe she had cheated herself into a belief that she was rather weak-minded and indulgent than otherwise; but in this she was in error. I believe she was fond of us in a hard unyielding way, but she was sudden and impulsive in her movements, and never handled us without hurting us. There was a housemaid—Jane
