small number of young boys taken (for obvious reasons) as pupils instead of the young men of former years. The society of many pleasant acquaintances was freely enjoyed here, and Louisa had really a fair share of girlish gaiety of spirits.
This is the place for a few specimens of youthful vivacity in conversation with intimates. She was quite a girl, when on "Royal Oak" day she saw some elder friends wearing sprays of oakleaves in their dress, and earnestly begged them to tell her "what was the contrary to oak" that she might put it on.
It was at the same age that, conversing with her sister on an unfortunate love affair and the blight it was supposed to have brought on the principal sufferer, she answered, with an image drawn from her young brother's Australian grazing experiences, "No, not a blight, only the burning of the grass that makes it grow all the richer afterwards." She afterwards more sententiously observed, "The misfortune in love affairs is that both men and women have an ideal for their object a little higher than their own merits entitle them to."—She was shown by a
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