And if I do not confide all my own follies to it, I am certainly not justified in recording other people's.
Not that Matilda makes any secret of the hero-worship she wasted on the man with the chiselled face and weird eyes, whom we used to see on the Riflebury Esplanade.

She never spoke to him; but neither for that matter did his dog, a Scotch deerhound with eyes very like his master's, and a long nose which (uncomfortable as the position must have been) he kept always resting in his master's hand as the two paced up and down, hour after hour, by the sea.
What folly Miss Perry talked on the subject it boots not at this date to record.

_I_ never indulged a more fanciful feeling towards him than wonder, just dashed with a little fear--but I would myself have liked to know the meaning of that long gaze he and the dog sometimes turned on us! We shall never know now, however, for the poor gentleman died in a lunatic asylum.
I hope, when they shut him up, that they found the deerhound guilty also of some unhydrophobiac madness, and imprisoned the two friends together! Of course we laugh now about Matilda's fancy for the insane gentleman, though she declares that at the time she could never keep him out of her head--that if she had met him thirty-four successive times on the Esplanade, she would have borne no small amount of torture to earn the privilege of one more turn to meet him for the thirty-fifth--and that her rest was broken by waking dreams of the possible misfortunes which might account for his (and the dog's) obvious melancholy, and of impossible circumstances in which she should act as their good angel and deliverer.
At the time she kept her own counsel, and it was not because she had ever heard of the weird-eyed gentleman and his deerhound that Mrs.
Minchin concluded her advice to Aunt Theresa on one occasion by a shower of nods which nearly shook the poppies out of her bonnet, and the oracular utterance--"She's got some nonsense or other into her head, depend upon it.

Send her to school!" One thing has often struck me in reading the biographies of great people.

They must have to be written in quite a different way to the biographies of common people like ourselves.
For instance, when a practised writer is speaking of the early days of celebrated poets, he says quite gravely--"Like Byron, Scott, and other illustrious men, Hogg (the Ettrick shepherd) fell in love in his very early childhood." And of course it sounds better than if one said, "Like Smith, and Brown, and Jones, and nine out of every ten children, he did not wait for years of discretion to make a fool of himself." Not being illustrious, Matilda blushes to remember this early folly; and not being a poet's biographer, Aunt Theresa said in a severe voice, for the general behoof of the school-room, that "Little girls were sometimes very silly, and got a great deal of nonsense into their heads." I do not think it ever dawned upon her mind that girls' heads not being jam-pots--which if you do not fill them will remain empty--the best way to keep folly out was to put something less foolish in.
She would have taken a great deal of trouble that her daughters might not be a flounce behind the fashions, and was so far-seeing in her motherly anxieties, that she junketed herself and Major Buller to many an entertainment, where they were bored for their pains, that an extensive acquaintance might ensure to the girls partners, both for balls and for life when they came to require them.