ard to attend to anything less interesting than my
thoughts, I was difficult to teach. Several of my uncles and aunts had
tried to teach me to read, and because they could not, and because I was
much older than children who read easily, had come to think, as I have
learnt since, that I had not all my faculties. But for an accident they
might have thought it for a long time. My father was staying in the house
and never went to church, and that gave me the courage to refuse to set
out one Sunday morning. I was often devout, my eyes filling with tears at
the thought of God and of my own sins, but I hated church. My grandmother
tried to teach me to put my toes first to the ground because I suppose I
stumped on my heels and that took my pleasure out of the way there. Later
on when I had learnt to read I took pleasure in the words of the hymn, but
never understood why the choir took three times as long as I did in
getting to the end; and the part of the service I liked, the sermon and
passages of the Apocalypse and Ecclesiastes, were no compensation for all
the repetitions and for the fatigue of so much standing. My father said if
I would not go to church he would teach me to read. I think now that he
wanted to make me go for my grandmother's sake and could think of no other
way. He was an angry and impatient teacher and flung the reading book at
my head, and next Sunday I decided to go to church. My father had,
however, got interested in teaching me, and only shifted the lesson to a
week-day till he had conquered my wandering mind. My first clear image of
him was fixed on my imagination, I believe, but a few days before the
first lesson. He had just arrived from London and was walking up and down
the nursery floor. He had a very black beard and hair, and one cheek
bulged out with a fig that was there to draw the pain out of a bad tooth.
One of the nurses (a nurse had come from London with my brothers and
sisters) said to the other that a live frog, she had heard, was best of
all. Then I was sent to a dame school kept by an old woman who stood us in
rows and had a long stick like a billiard cue to get at the back rows. My
father was still at Sligo when I came back from my first lesson and asked
me what I had been taught. I said I had been taught to sing, and he said,
"sing then" and I sang

"Little drops of water,
Little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean,
And the pleasant land"

high up in my head. So my father