The lessons themselves, managed on the old high-and-dry lines, were not calculated to arouse any enthusiasm in young minds. Oh, the drudgery of those hours of geography, when we spent our time constructing hills, valleys, and table-lands out of clay in the garden, or made models of the railway systems across the lawn: when, perched on separate islands in the bathing-pool, we had to launch mechanical boats to one another, freighted with the principal exports of the various countries—it is no wonder that, with these methods, the science took little hold on our imaginations! It might win the assent of the brain, but it could find no lodgment in our hearts. Oh, the dreary mornings we spent in weaving baskets, or making artificial flowers, or calculating our winnings at _petits chevaux_ with the mathematical mistress! The truth is, perhaps, that I was too young for these things, and was all the time having to conform to the standard of a class intellectually in advance of my own attainments. My most grateful memories are of the mistress who, four times a week, drew French out of us: and that, I am afraid, not because she attracted us, but because it was an understood thing that in those periods it was safe to “rag” as much as you liked. The lowest French class was taken by a master, the only man employed on the staff, and him we spared in deference to his sex; but Mademoiselle Amboise was fair game for us, and I am afraid the poor woman must have suffered acutely “Ah, Mademoiselle, que je m’ennuie!” we would say to her from time to time, and the poor soul would rush to your side to comfort you. She would carefully teach us the chorus of a song, and then, when she had sung through a verse of eight lines in her beautiful voice, we would either have forgotten the words of the refrain, or intentionally murder the tune of it, and the whole process had to be begun again. Or she would deliver the whole of the opening soliloquy in some old-world play of Rostand’s, and then look round for the new characters to come in, only to find that we had all played truant and run off into the country, leaving one girl in the seats of the little theatre (Mademoiselle was very short-sighted) to do the applause all by herself! I remember one girl affecting to have lost her memory, so as to be unable to speak a word of French, and our delight when Mademoiselle Amboise, breaking the strict rule against talking English in French class, burst out, “Ah, Miss ——, you are little pig!”