CHAPTER VIII 
WALPOLE HOUSE 
Tue Maui, CHiswick 
. HEN the present century was in its teens and on a sun- 
shiny morning in June, there drove up to the great 
iron gate of Miss Pinkerton’s Academy for young 
ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses 
in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered 
hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour. A black servant 
who reposed on the box beside the fat coachman, uncurled his 
bandy legs as soon as the equipage drew up opposite Miss Pinker- 
ton’s shining brass plate, and as he pulled the bell at least a score 
of young heads were seen peering out of the narrow windows of 
the stately old brick house. Nay, the acute observer might have 
recognized the little red nose of good-natured Miss Jemima Pinker- 
ton herself, rising over the geranium pots in the window of that 
lady’s own drawing-room.”’ 
At the moment when William Makepeace Thackeray wrote 
these words in the well-known opening to “ Vanity Fair,” there 
is no doubt that he had in his mind’s eye Walpole House—the 
beautiful old Restoration House on Chiswick Mall at which, once 
upon a time, he had been at school. A certain Doctor Turner 
was the pedagogue into whose care the little fatherless boy from 
India had been entrusted. There is no reason to think that he 
was not kindly treated—though he seems to have been very unhappy 
there—and to have attempted to run away, but got no farther 
than Young’s Corner. A pretty, gentle, timid child who was 
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