Do the ladies of Lysterby continue to train atrociously and mismanage children, to starve and thwart them, as they did in those far-off days, so remote that on looking back it seems to me now that somebody else and not I, a pacific and indifferent woman, content with most things round about me, lived those five years of perpetual passion and frantic unhappiness? Or has the old convent vanished, and carried off its long tale of incompetence, ignorance, cruel stupidity, and futile vexation?

For the seeds of many an illness were stored up in young bodies by systematic under-feeding, and hunger turned most of us into wistful little gluttons, gazing longingly into the cake-shops as we marched two by two through the tiny city, dreaming at night of Barmecide feasts, and envying the fate of the happier children at home, who devoured all the sweet things we with our empty little stomachs so bitterly remembered.
 
Sweet things only! Enough of bread-and-butter would have satisfied our craving. When one of us sickened and rejected the single thin slice of bread-and-butter allowed the children at breakfast, oh, the prayer and expectation of each pair of hungry eyes fixed upon the sufferer, to see to whom she would offer her neglected slice! The slice was cut in two, and usually offered, while the nun was not looking, to the children on either side. This miscarriage of appetite, we noted with regret, more frequently happened at the two tables of the big girls, where such windfalls were constantly amplifying the meagre breakfasts of somebody or other in long skirts. But we were only ten, and our appetite was pretty steady and never satisfied. Now it taxes all my heroism to visit the dentist; but then I knew each visit was a prospective joy, for, if I did not cry, the lay-teacher who conducted me thither always allowed me to buy a jam-tart, which I ate as slowly as possible in the confectioner\'s shop, noting the ravages of my teeth in the cake of delight with melancholy and dismay. I so loved the recompense that I used to watch anxiously for the first sign of a shaky tooth, and the instant it was removed, I was sure to shriek out excitedly—
 
"You see, Miss Lawson, I didn\'t cry a bit."

But I would not have it thought that those early school-days were days of untempered bitterness and constant ache. We were a merry lot of little savages as far as the authorities permitted us to enjoy ourselves, and life continually revealed its quaint surprises and thrilling terrors. I learnt to read with amazing rapidity, and my favourite books were of a kind liberally supplied by the convent library—Tyburn, wonderful tales of the escapes and underground adventures of Jesuits, double walls, spring-doors, mysterious passages, whitened bones in long-forgotten boxes. Thanks to my ingenuity and vivid imagination, our days became for us all a wild romance. Relegated to the infirmary by prolonged illnesses, the result of semi-starvation, naturally I had leisure to read laboriously various volumes of this edifying literature.

The infirmary itself was a chamber of legend. It was a kind of out-building to which led a long corridor behind just the sort of door my mind was fixed upon, a mere panel that in no way differed from the rest of the wainscoted wall, the very door for a Jesuit to vanish through from the pursuit of mailed myrmidons. At the end of the corridor you went down a[Pg 132] flight of stairs, then up another flight into a pretty little green-and-white room, low beamed, with cozy cots, and long windows looking out beyond the rose-bushes, and a slip of velvet lawn, where a terrible-looking and most enchanti............