Page:Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey (1st edition), Volume 3 (Agnes Grey).djvu/70

62 useful hint, or an unfortunate governess received thereby the slightest benefit, I am well rewarded for my pains.

To avoid trouble and confusion, I have taken my pupils one by one, and discussed their various qualities; but this can give no adequate idea of being worried by the whole three together, when, as was often the case, all were determined to "be naughty, and to tease Miss Grey, and put her in a passion."

Sometimes, on such occasions, the thought has suddenly occurred to me—"If they could see me now!" meaning, of course, my friends at home, and the idea of how they would pity me, has made me pity myself—so greatly that I have had the utmost difficulty to restrain my tears; but I have restrained them, till my little tormentors were gone to dessert, or cleared off to bed, (my only prospects of deliverance,) and then, in all the bliss of solitude, I have given myself up to the luxury of an unrestricted burst of weeping. But this was a weakness I did not often indulge: my employments were too numerous, my leisure moments were too precious to admit of much time being given to fruitless lamentations.

I particularly remember one wild, snowy