legend: 'Seminary for Young Ladies. Miss Twinkleton.' The house-
front is so old and worn, and the brass plate is so shining and
staring, that the general result has reminded imaginative strangers
of a battered old beau with a large modern eye-glass stuck in his
blind eye.

Whether the nuns of yore, being of a submissive rather than a
stiff-necked generation, habitually bent their contemplative heads
to avoid collision with the beams in the low ceilings of the many
chambers of their House; whether they sat in its long low windows
telling their beads for their mortification, instead of making
necklaces of them for their adornment; whether they were ever
walled up alive in odd angles and jutting gables of the building
for having some ineradicable leaven of busy mother Nature in them
which has kept the fermenting world alive ever since; these may be
matters of interest to its haunting ghosts (if any), but constitute
no item in Miss Twinkleton's half-yearly accounts. They are
neither of Miss Twinkleton's inclusive regulars, nor of her extras.
The lady who undertakes the poetical department of the
establishment at so much (or so little) a quarter has no pieces in
her list of recitals bearing on such unprofitable questions.

As, in some cases of drunkenness, and in others of animal
magnetism, there are two states of consciousness which never clash,
but each of which pursues its separate course as though it were
continuous instead of broken (thus, if I hide my watch when I am
drunk, I must be drunk again before I can remember where), so Miss
Twinkleton has two distinct and separate phases of being. Every
night, the moment the young ladies have retired to rest, does Miss
Twinkleton smarten up her curls a little, brighten up her eyes a