me some novel of Fenimore Cooper's. I found delightful
adventures in the woods--one day a blind worm and an adder fighting in a
green hollow, and sometimes Mrs. Earle would be afraid to tidy the room
because I had put a bottle full of newts on the mantle-piece. Now and then
a boy from a farm on the other side of the road threw a pebble at my
window at daybreak, and he and I went fishing in the big second pond. Now
and then another farmer's boy and I shot sparrows with an old pepper box
revolver and the boy would roast them on a string. There was an old horse
one of the painters called the scaffolding, and sometimes a son of old
Earle's drove with me to Slough and once to Windsor, and at Windsor we
made our lunch of cold sausages bought from a public house. I did not know
what it was to be alone, for I could wander in pleasant alarm through the
enclosed parts, then very large, or round some pond imagining ships going
in and out among the reeds and thinking of Sligo or of strange seafaring
adventures in the fine ship I should launch when I grew up. I had always a
lesson to learn before night and that was a continual misery, for I could
very rarely, with so much to remember, set my thoughts upon it and then
only in fear. One day my father told me that a painter had said I was very
thick-skinned and did not mind what was said to me, and I could not
understand how anybody could be so unjust. It made me wretched to be idle
but one could not help it. I was once surprised and shocked. All but my
father and myself had been to London, and Kennedy and Farrar and Page, I
remember the names vaguely, arrived laughing and talking. One of them had
carried off a card of texts from the waiting room of the station and hung
it up on the wall. I thought "he has stolen it," but my father and all
made it a theme of merry conversation.

Then I returned to Sligo for a few weeks as I was to do once or twice in
every year for years, and after that we settled in London. Perhaps my
mother and the other children had been there all the time, for I remember
my father now and again going to London. The first house we lived in was
close to Burne Jones's house at North End, but we moved after a year or
two to Bedford Park. At North End we had a pear tree in the garden and
plenty of pears, but the pears used to be full of maggots, and almost
opposite lived a school-master called O'Neill, and when a little boy told
me that the school-master's great-grandfath