cutlery they possessed. There was no love lost between a brother of twenty, who could thus bully a sister of four or five, and make himself disagreeable all round. It would have been odd had he not sown in the girl's mind a plentiful crop of dislike or hatred. Alexander, so much nearer herself in age, was less disliked, but does not seem to have been, at first, much more loved. At one time it seemed as if he thought himself entitled to imitate the lordly ways of Jacob, and his contempt of the little sister, shy, small for her age, and uneducated even in the family inheritance, music. William, on the other hand, was a family idol to the girl and her parents. When she failed to find him and her father on the parade-ground after a year's absence from home, and returned to the house to see them all seated at table, "my dear brother William threw down his knife and fork, and ran to welcome, and crouched down to me, which made me forget all my grievances." The young soldier, the hero of her romance, was then eighteen years of age; the girl was six. Could a more charming picture of brotherly love have been drawn, or a firmer foundation laid for the sisterly affection that continued unimpaired through half a century of toilsome and absorbing work? With much difficulty the girl was allowed to receive some sewing lessons at a school where girls of higher rank were taught. It was the means of introducing her to a young lady who, as Mrs. Beckedorff, became a lifelong friend and companion at Windsor, and, sixty years later, at Hanover. Caroline was, as she says herself, the Cinderella of the family. "I could never find time," she wrote in 1838, "for improving myself in many things I knew,
