which I joyfully accepted, observing, "Now I am like those poor dear
French prisoners that everybody pities so." Mrs. Siddons at that time
lived next door to us; she came in one day when I had committed some of
my daily offenses against manners or morals, and I was led, nothing
daunted, into her awful presence, to be admonished by her.

Melpomene took me upon her lap, and, bending upon me her "controlling
frown," discoursed to me of my evil ways in those accents which curdled
the blood of the poor shopman, of whom she demanded if the printed
calico she purchased of him "would wash." The tragic tones pausing, in
the midst of the impressed and impressive silence of the assembled
family, I tinkled forth, "What beautiful eyes you have!" all my small
faculties having been absorbed in the steadfast upward gaze I fixed upon
those magnificent orbs. Mrs. Siddons set me down with a smothered laugh,
and I trotted off, apparently uninjured by my great-aunt's solemn moral
suasion.

A dangerous appeal, of a higher order, being made to me by my aunt's
most intimate friend, Mrs. F----, a not very judicious person, to the
effect, "Fanny, why don't you pray to God to make you better?"
immediately received the conclusive reply, "So I do, and he makes me
worse and worse." Parents and guardians should be chary of handling the
deep chords upon whose truth and strength the highest harmonies of the
fully developed soul are to depend.

In short, I was as hopelessly philosophical a subject as Madame Roland,
when, at six years old, receiving her penal bread and water with the
comment, "Bon pour la digestion!" and the retributive stripes which this
drew upon her, with the further observation, "Bon pour la circulation!"
In spite of my "wickedness," as Topsy would say, I appear to have been