was no luggage to carry. Lily's effects would
not have filled an ordinary carpet-bag; but
Blunt had graciously informed Mrs. Pigott that
she might keep the child's clothes, as new clothes
would be provided for her at the place whither
she was bound. Where that place might be, the
good woman did not venture to ask.

At the end of the lane – not that by which Mr.
Blunt had approached, but its opposite extremity
– a hackney-coach was waiting. It was now
nearly dark. By F. B.'s direction Nurse Pigott
lifted Lily into the vehicle, which had already,
as she could obscurely discern, one occupant,
and that a man. The child was by this time
wholly tired, and half asleep. The dandy
condescendingly gave Nurse Pigott a couple of
fingers, dexterously hustled her on one side, and
in another minute she found herself crying in
the middle of the road, quite alone.

But not so lonely as poor little Lily, albeit
she was in a carriage with two men, one of
whom told her that he was her papa.

CHAPTER IV. THE MISS BUNNYCASTLES'
ESTABLISHMENT.

EARLY to bed and early to rise was the
time-honoured maxim in the establishment of
the Miss Bunnycastles, Rhododendron House,
Rhododendron private road, Stockwell. Time-
honoured indeed, and with justice it might be
called, for it had been acted upon for at least
twenty years, during which lengthened period
the Bunnycastle family had kept a ladies' school
in Rhododendron-road, as aforesaid. Stay; I have
fallen into a slight error. When Mrs. Bunnycastle
first undertook, in the second decade of
the nineteenth century, those scholastic duties
at Stockwell which her daughters subsequently
and efficiently performed, Rhododendron private
road existed only in the form of a narrow path
between two market gardens, and went, I fear,
by the painfully unacademic name of Cut-throat-
lane. But when culture came to Clapham, and
civilisation to Stockwell, the by-path became a
"private road," neatly gravelled, and bordered
by trim villas. The old market gardener's
habitation indeed remained, but was rechristened
Rhododendron House. Formerly it had been
known as Bubb's Folly. Bubb was the last
market gardener, and inherited the house: a
rambling one-storied structure of red brick:
from his grandfather. Long and careful attention
to horticulture brought him riches, and in his
old age it was bruited about that he had become
somewhat mad, though not so mad as to require any
restraint, or be in any way incapable of managing
his own affairs; for he was to the day of his death
as avaricious an old screw, and as keen a hand
at a bargain, as could be found between
Bermondsey and Brixton. His madness did not go
further than that harmless eccentricity to which
physiologists may have observed that enriched
tailors, hatters, and market gardeners, are
frequently subject. In pursuance of this craze,
Bubb turned all his nephews and nieces out of
doors, contracted a morganatic alliance with a
bold-faced housekeeper with an abusive tongue
and an uncontrollable taste for silk dresses and
ardent spirits, and – he who had sat for so many
years under the Reverend Mr. Bradbody of Stockwell,
and had even been a deacon to that shining
congregational light – plunged headlong into
secularism, attended infidel lectures, and ceased
to believe in anything. He took to drinking
also. In a word, Mr. Bubb was in his latter
days that by no means uncommon character, a
" wicked old man ;" a quarrelsome old curmudgeon,
who swore hard, drank hard, and didn't
wash. As a climax to his strange proceedings, he
added a tower, or belvedere, to his grandfather's
old brick house. At the summit of this edifice,
which resembled externally a Chinese pagoda
brick faced, and with a dash of the truncated
factory chimney about it, he built a smoking-
room, where he swore and drank and took tobacco,
till his time came, and he died. The pagoda-
chimney belvedere had caused the house to be
called Bubb's Folly ; and long after Bubb's
decease, ancient people persisted in applying the
old title to Rhododendron House.

If the belvedere, however, were Bubb's Folly,
the surrounding ground, which he directed in his
will to be carefully let out in building lots, might,
with equal propriety, have been designated Bubb's
Common Sense. The morganatic housekeeper,
to the rage and despair of the nephews and
nieces, came into all the property, and even the
High Court of Chancery could not pick a hole
in the crazy old market gardener's last will and
testament. The enriched housekeeper removed
to grander quarters at Clapham, and the old
brick Folly passed through many vicissitudes,
while houses in the most modern style of
domestic architecture sprang up on either side.
Bubb, however, had willed that his Folly was not
to be demolished, and, being advertised, at last,
as " eligible school premises," with " an observatory
admirably suited for scientific purposes,"
it was taken about the year eighteen hundred and
sixteen by Mrs. Bunnycastle, and turned into an
establishment for young ladies.

Mrs. Bunnycastle's husband was a gentleman
who had taught writing, arithmetic, and the use
of the globes, in surburban seminaries, for many
years. He also gave instruction in the Belles
Lettres: that is to say, he would recite, with the
sonorous emphasis of the late John Kemble, any
number of pages from the " Elegant Extracts"
and "Enfield's Speaker." To this declamation
young ladies of a literary turn (it was a blue-stocking
age) listened with intense admiration. Mrs.
Bunnycastle (née Lappin) had been in her youth
a nursery-governess in a great family, and was
of a soft sentimental disposition. She was a
great educational theorist, and had so filled her
head with dogmas of tuition out of Jean Jacques
Rousseau, Madame Leprince de Beaumont, and
Mesdames Chapone, Trimmer, and Hannah More
– to say nothing of Dr. Edgworth, and the