Educazione domestica

house than taking another lease of fourteen years. She could not conceive, as the last lease had answered so well, why the next should not. I remember seeing her face, all puckered with wrinkles, surmounted by rows of bright brown false curls, and her arms, bare above the elbows, adorned with armlets, such as young ladies wore half a century before. I remember a clever pert youth setting himself to quiz and amuse her by humouring her in her notions about the state of the world, drawing her out to praise the last century and express her ignorant contempt of this, till she nodded emphatically over her hand of cards, and declared that the depravity of the age was owing to gas-lamps and macadamisation. She died very old, but no wiser than this. Her case proves only that her education did stop; and not that it need have stopped. The other was a woman of no great cultivation, but of a humble, earnest, benevolent nature, full of a sense of duty towards God and man; and, in them, towards herself. Having survived her nearest connections, she had no strong desire to live; and her affairs were always arranged for departure, down to the labelling of every paper, and the neatness of every drawer. Yet no one was more alive to the improvements of the modern world. I shall never forget the earnest look with which she would listen to any tidings of new knowledge, or new social conveniences. A more dignified woman I never knew; yet she listened to the young who brought information--listened as a learner--with a deference which was most touching to witness. But there was more than this. She was conscious of having been, in her earlier days, somewhat hard, somewhat given to lecture and lay down the law, and criticise people all round by family notions; a tendency which, if it really existed, arose from family and not personal pride; for, though she might overrate the wisdom of parents and brothers, there never was any sign of her overvaluing her own.…