Sepoys instead of English and Russians. Children in each generation I suppose follow wars by their toys. Despite the comradeship of English and French in the Crimea, I do not believe that we ever quite ceased to regard France as the hereditary foe. A contemporary cousin was said to have effaced France from the map of Europe; I do not think we were quite so daring.

In all, I rejoiced in five brothers and two sisters, but the fifth brother died at fourteen months old before our youngest sister was born. His death was our first real sorrow and a very keen one. Long before that, however, when we were only three children, Gilbert, the brother next to me, a baby sister Agnes, and myself, our adventurous parents took us to the South of France. I was four years old at the time and the existence of a foreign land was quite a new light to me. I well remember running into the nursery and triumphantly exclaiming, “There is a country called France and I am going there!”

My further recollections are vague until we reached Lyons, where the railway ended and our large travelling carriage brought from England was put on a boat—steamer, I suppose—and thus conveyed to Avignon. Thence we drove, sleeping at various towns, until we reached Mentone, where we spent some time, and I subsequently learnt that we were then the only English in the place. I think that my parents were very brave to take about such young children, but I suppose the experiment answered pretty well, as a year later they again took Gilbert and me to France—this time to Normandy, where I spent my sixth birthday, saw the great horses dragging bales of cotton along the quays at Rouen, and was enchanted with the ivory toys at Dieppe.

I think that people who could afford it travelled more in former days than is realised. Both my grandparents made prolonged tours with most of their elder children. My grandfather Westminster took my mother and her elder sisters in his yacht to Constantinople and Rome. My mother well remembered some of her experiences, including purchases from a Turkish shopkeeper who kept a large cat on his counter and served various comestibles with his hands, wiping them between each sale on the animal’s fur. At Rome she told me how she and one of her sisters, girls of some twelve and thirteen years old, used to wander out alone into the Campagna in the early morning, which seems very strange in view of the stories of restraint placed upon children in bygone days. As to my grandfather Leigh, I believe he travelled with his family for about two years, to Switzerland, France and the North of Italy. They had three carriages, one for the parents, one for the schoolroom, and one for the nursery. A courier escorted them, and an avant-courier rode on in front with bags of five-franc pieces to secure lodgings when they migrated from one place to another. On one occasion on the Riviera they met the then Grand Duke Constantine, who thrust his head out of the window and exclaimed “Toute Angleterre est en route!”

After our return from Normandy we were placed in charge of a resident governess, a young German, but as far as I can recollect she had very little control over us. We discovered that the unlucky girl, though of German parentage, had been born in Russia, and with the unconscious cruelty of children taunted her on this account. Anyhow her stay was short, and she was succeeded about a year later by an Englishwoman, Miss Custarde, who kept us in very good order and stayed till she married when I was fourteen. Her educational efforts were supplemented by masters and mistresses during the London season and by French resident governesses in the winter months, but I do not think that we were at all overworked.

I doubt whether Miss Custarde would have been considered highly educated according to modern standards, but she was very good in teaching us to look up information for ourselves, which was just as useful as anything else. Her strongest point was music, but that she could not drive into me, and my music lessons were a real penance to teacher and pupil alike. She would give me lectures during their progress on such topics as the Parable of the Talents—quite ignoring the elementary fact that though I could learn most of my lessons quickly enough I had absolutely no talent for music. She was, however, a remarkable woman with great influence, not only over myself, but over my younger aunts and over other men and women. She was very orderly, and proud of that quality, but she worked too much on my conscience, making me regard trivial faults as actual sins which prevented her from kissing me or showing me affection—an ostracism which generally resulted in violent fits of penitence. She had more than one admirer before she ended by marrying a schoolmaster, with whom she used to take long walks in the holidays. One peculiarity was that she would give me sketches of admirers and get me to write long stories embodying their imaginary adventures. I suppose these were shown as great jokes to the heroes and their friends. Of course she did not think I knew the “inwardness” of her various friendships, equally of course as time went on I understood them perfectly. Miss Custarde is not the only governess I have known who acquired extraordinary influence over her pupils. In Marcel Prevost’s novel Anges Gardiens, which represents the dangers to French families of engaging foreign governesses, he makes the Belgian, Italian, and German women all to a greater or less extent immoral, but the Englishwoman, though at least as detestable as the others, is not immoral; the great evil which she inflicts on the family which engages her is the absolute power which she acquires over her pupil. The whole book is very unfair and M. Prevost seems to overlook the slur which he casts on his own countrymen, as none of the men appear able to resist the wiles of the sirens engaged to look after the girls of their families; but it is odd that he should realise the danger of undue influence and attribute it only to the Englishwoman. Why should this be a characteristic of English governesses—supposing his experience (borne out by my own) to be typical? Is it an Englishwoman’s love of power and faculty for concentration on the object which she wishes to attain?

We liked several of our foreign governesses well enough, but they exercised no particular influence—and as a rule their engagements were only temporary. I do not think that Miss Custarde gave them much opportunity of ascendancy. With one her relations were so strained that the two ladies had their suppers at different tables in the schoolroom, and when the Frenchwoman wanted the salt she rang the bell for the schoolroom-maid to bring it from her English colleague’s table. However, I owed a great deal to Miss Custarde and know that her affection for all of us was very real. She died in the autumn of 1920, having retained all her faculties till an advanced age.

After all no human being could compete with our mother in the estimation of any of her children. Small and fragile and often suffering from ill-health, she had almost unbounded power over everyone with whom she came in contact, and for her to express an opinion on any point created an axiom from which there was no appeal. As middle-aged men and women we have often laughed over the way in which we have still accepted “mama said” so-and-so as a final verdict. As children our faith not only in her wisdom but in her ability was unlimited. I remember being regarded as almost a heretic by the younger ones because I ventured to doubt whether she could make a watch. Vainly did I hedge by asserting that I was certain that if she had learnt she