to suppress the temper it indicated, and, as
she mildly suggested, "cut it out of me when I was young"--a counsel, I
must own, she did not follow.

Too straitened in her means to keep a governess for me, and unwilling
to send me to a school, my mother became my teacher herself; and, not
having had any but the very commonest education, she was obliged to
acquire in advance what she desired to impart. Many a night would she
pore over the Latin Grammar, that she might be even one stage before me
in the morning. Over and over did she get up the bit of geography that
was to test my knowledge the next day; and in this way, while leading
_me_ on, she acquired, almost without being aware of it, a considerable
amount of information. Her faculties were above the common, and her zeal
could not be surpassed; so that, while I was stumbling and blundering
over "Swaine's Sentences," she had read all Sallust's "Catiline," and
most of the "Odes" of Horace; and long before I had mastered my German
declensions, she was reading "Grimm's Stories" and Auerbach's "Village
Sketches." Year after year went over quietly, uneventfully. I had long
ceased to remember my former life of splendor, or, if it recurred to
me, it came with no more of reality than the events of a dream. One day,
indeed,--I shall never forget it,--the past revealed itself before me
with the vivid distinctness of a picture, and, I shame to say, rendered
me unhappy and discontented for several days after. I was returning one
afternoon from a favorite haunt, where I used to spend hours,--the old
churchyard of Killester, a long-unused cemetery, with a ruined church
beside it,--when four spanking chestnuts came to the foot of the little
rise on which the ruin stood, and the servants, jumping down, undid the
bearing-reins, to breathe the cattle up the ascent. It was my father was
on the box; and as he skilfully brushed the flies from his horses with
his whip, gently soothing the hot-mettled creatures with his voice, I
bethought me of the proud time when I sat beside him, and when he talked
to me of the different tempers of each horse in the team, instilling
into me that interest and that love for them, as thinking sentient
creatures, which gives the horse a distinct character to all who have
learned thus to think of him from childhood. He never looked at me as he
passed. How should he recognize the little boy in the gray linen blouse
he was wont to see in black velvet with silver