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34 BIOGRAPHY.
the day. In order that we both might share this great
pleasure, she let Fredrika read with me, although one year
younger than myself; and Fredrika was beyond measure
happy, when, on my fifteenth birthday, we began “ Les
Petits Emigrés,” by Madame de Genlis. We were not
permitted to read more than half an hour each at a time,
and for this hour we longed the whole day. After having
gone through “Les Petits Emigrés,” we read Miss Bur-
ney’s interesting and cleverly written novels, “ Camilla,”
“ Evelina,” and “ Cecilia,” abounding, however, as I after-
wards discovered, in romantic adventures.
How little profitable such reading is for young girls,
especially at our age, and so entirely without experience as
we were then, soon becanie manifest by all the fancies and
imaginations which we got into our heads about ourselves
and what might happen to us. We only longed to escape
from our convent-like seclusion at Arsta. We did not at
all doubt that, when we came out in the world, we should
become the heroines of romance, and, like the heroines in
novels, find many admirers, and meet with many advent-
ures of which we had not even dreamt previously. Who
could answer for it that even now, before we came out in
the world, some extraordinary adventure might not happen
at Arsta. During the whole autumn, I was listening every
evening in the dusk, to hear a ladder raised against the
wall under one of the windows of my room; and, although
the escape down the high ladder might be a break-neck
affair, yet I felt a kind of foreboding that, like the lovely
Indiana in “ Camilla,” I should be carried off, I did not
know by whom, — this I could never guess, — but the hero
would perhaps afterwards discover and declare himself.
Fredrika had also forebodings of abductions: either she
or myself was to be the object; but neither did she know
by whom we were to be carried off; she was sure that it
was going to happen in broad daylight, on a Sunday, on
our way from church, to which we drove, as usual, accom-
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