To Miss B---- I was indebted for the first doll I remember possessing--a
gorgeous wax personage, in white muslin and cherry-colored ribbons, who,
by desire of the donor, was to be called Philippa, in honor of my uncle.
I never loved or liked dolls, though I remember taking some pride in the
splendor of this, my first-born. They always affected me with a grim
sense of being a mockery of the humanity they were supposed to
represent; there was something uncanny, not to say ghastly, in the doll
existence and its mimicry of babyhood to me, and I had a nervous
dislike, not unmixed with fear, of the smiling simulacra that girls are
all supposed to love with a species of prophetic maternal instinct.

The only member of my aunt Twiss's family of whom I remember at this
time little or nothing was the eldest son, Horace, who in subsequent
years was one of the most intimate and familiar friends of my father and
mother, and who became well known as a clever and successful public man,
and a brilliant and agreeable member of the London society of his day.

My stay of a little more than a year at Bath had but one memorable
event, in its course, to me. I was looking one evening, at bedtime, over
the banisters, from the upper story into the hall below, with tiptoe
eagerness that caused me to overbalance myself and turn over the rail,
to which I clung on the wrong side, suspended, like Victor Hugo's
miserable priest to the gutter of Notre Dame, and then fell four stories
down on the stone pavement of the hall. I was not killed, or apparently
injured, but whether I was not really irreparably damaged no human being
can possibly tell.

My next memories refer to a residence which my parents were occupying
when I returned to London, called Covent Garden Chambers, now, I