the children under the mother's direction, but to do so under her espionnage-the painfully suspicious espionnage of an intensely interested, but consciously incompetent ruler. Surely a select and well-constituted school, managed by such a mistress as I have described, would in most cases be better for a girl than such a homeeducation. It is not the best state of things, certainly, but it may lead to a better one than the present. I have another word to say on the subject of the Ladies' Colleges-institutions which appear to me calculated to produce great and lasting benefit to the country. It is only under the direction of good mothers-and, failing them, of good governesses-that lectures at a college, or any where else, can really be beneficial to very young girls. To young women whose schoolroom education is finished, and who are earnestly desirous of acquiring knowledge, lectures by accomplished professors are of real value; they are no longer children, and may be safely left to pursue their studies by themselves; but little girls are not the sort of students to learn much from academic lectures. This is, I find, the opinion of many professors at the colleges already established and new arrangements and : limitations with regard to age are being made in consequence, which will facilitate the good work to be achieved by these institutions. Although this little book attempts to give a truthful idea of life in a good school, the whole is fictitious, nothing in it being copied from real life except the name and uses of the "Grey Room" and the sketch of Inez Olivarez, which was suggested by a Portuguese girl whom I knew at school. It was written some years ago, when school-days were fresher in my memory |