Let us come back to Pheasantina, who, I am told, was a delicate and
somewhat fractious infant, giving to both father and mother considerable
cause for anxiety. Her first attempts at rising in the world were
attended with disaster, for as she was lying in a cradle, with carved
iron canopy, and was for a moment left by her nurse in full faith that
she could not rise from the recumbent position, Miss Pheasantina
determined to show that she was capable of unexpected independence, and
made a vigorous struggle to assume that upright position which is the
proud prerogative of man. In another moment the recumbent position was
re-assumed, and the nurse returning found the baby's face covered with
blood, streaming from a severe wound on the forehead, the iron fretwork
having proved harder than the baby's head. The scar remains down to the
present time, and gives me the valuable peculiarity of only wrinkling up
one side of my forehead when I raise my eyebrows, a feat that I defy any
of my readers to emulate. The heavy cut has, I suppose, so injured the
muscles in that spot that they have lost the normal power of contraction.

My earliest personal recollections are of a house and garden that we
lived in when I was three and four years of age, situated in Grove Road,
St. John's Wood. I can remember my mother hovering round the dinner-table
to see that all was bright for the home-coming husband; my brother--two
years older than myself--and I watching "for papa"; the loving welcome,
the game of romps that always preceded the dinner of the elder folks. I
can remember on the first of October, 1851, jumping up in my little cot,
and shouting out triumphantly: "Papa! mamma! I am four years old!" and
the grave demand of my brother, conscious of superior age, at
dinner-time: "May not Annie have a knife to-day, as she is four years
old?"

It was a sore grievance during that same year 1851, that I was not judged