Cotter—who occasionally helped to put us to bed, and sometimes Nurse Starke undressed us while Jane put our hair into curl papers, and sometimes Nurse Starke did the curling while Jane undressed us. And the manner in which these duties were to be divided became a matter of no light speculation to us as evening approached, for it was Nurse Starke's custom to pull the locks of hair out to their full length, and then roll them round a piece of paper, twisting the ends together when the curl had been rolled well home, whereas Jane Cotter first made the curl up flat with her fingers, and then encased it gently in a triangular paper, which she pinched with the tongs. Jane Cotter's flat curls were pleasant to sleep upon, but Nurse Starke's corkscrews placed a comfortable night's rest out of the question. It is impossible to sleep in peace with a double row of balls, each as big as a large chestnut, round your head. You can't move without giving four or five of them a wrench.
I think we must have been sufficiently happy as a rule, or Sunday would not have stood out in such gaunt and desolate contrast to the other days of the week. There reigned in our nursery an unaccountable fiction that Sunday was a holiday; and in deference to this tradition we endeavoured to cheat ourselves into a belief that we were glad when that day arrived. Sunday began at a very early hour in Bloomsbury. It began to ring itself in at half-past seven when we got up, and continued to ring itself through the day at short intervals until it finally rang itself out, and us into bed, at half-past eight in the evening. There were drawbacks, how-
