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I have now come to a portion of my narrative which entails delicate handling, but I have promised that these pages shall contain confessions, and I will therefore lose no time in owning frankly that I was ever a flirt, and will candidly enter on the subject of my juvenile flirtations.

My first love was naturally much older than myself (being nearly fourteen), and very tall, a very handsome black-eyed fellow, the son of my father’s dear friend and colleague, the Port Admiral. He was by fits and starts very good and condescending to me, and accepted my devotion in rather a patronizing manner. In fact, he was the one qui tendait la joue. I blush to acknowledge that on the Sunday of my first appearance in church (I was then not much more than five years old) I spent nearly the whole of the sermon weighing in my own mind the probability of walking home with George. My wildest hope was fulfilled, little as I deserved it. Hand-in-hand we returned from church, where I had been an inattentive worshipper. My love often passed our nursery windows, of which there were four—two looking round the respective corners—and I invariably ran from one to the other, about the hour I expected his appearance, to watch that beloved, and to me gigantic, form, and follow it with my eyes out of sight. But my attachment though ardent, was not of very long duration; in my juvenile, if fickle, heart, George was ere long supplanted by no less a personage than the Commanding Officer of the Depôt. A man of his years, a soldier, a hero, who wore a Waterloo Medal and a brilliant uniform—a lover full of compliments—for