place my mother under a huge glass bell, made to cover some large group
of precious Dresden china, where her tiny figure and flashing face
produced even a more beautiful effect than the costly work of art whose
crystal covering was made her momentary cage. I have often heard my
mother refer to this season of her childhood's favoritism with the fine
folk of that day, one of her most vivid impressions of which was the
extraordinary beauty of person and royal charm of manner and deportment
of the Prince of Wales, and his enormous appetite: enormous perhaps,
after all, only by comparison with her own, which he compassionately
used to pity, saying frequently, when she declined the delicacies that
he pressed upon her, "Why, you poor child! Heaven has not blessed you
with an appetite." Of the precocious feeling and imagination of the poor
little girl, thus taken out of her own sphere of life into one so
different and so dangerous, I remember a very curious instance, told me
by herself. One of the houses where she was a most frequent visitor, and
treated almost like a child of the family, was that of Lady Rivers,
whose brother, Mr. Rigby, while in the ministry, fought a duel with some
political opponent. Mr. Rigby had taken great notice of the little
French child treated with such affectionate familiarity by his sister,
and she had attached herself so strongly to him that, on hearing the
circumstance of his duel suddenly mentioned for the first time, she
fainted away: a story that always reminded me of the little Spanish girl
Florian mentions in his "Mémoires d'un jeune Espagnol," who, at six
years of age, having asked a young man of upward of five and twenty if
he loved her, so resented his repeating her question to her elder sister
that she never could be induced to speak to him again.

Meantime, while the homes of the great and gay were her constant resort,
the child's home was becoming sadder, and her existence and that of her
parents more precarious and penurious day by day. From my grandfather's