myself, as I may say, literally to catch them at a
purpose in it. They had never, I think, wanted to do so many things for
their poor protectress; I mean--though they got their lessons better and
better, which was naturally what would please her most--in the way of
diverting, entertaining, surprising her; reading her passages, telling
her stories, acting her charades, pouncing out at her, in disguises, as
animals and historical characters, and above all astonishing her by the
"pieces" they had secretly got by heart and could interminably recite. I
should never get to the bottom--were I to let myself go even now--of the
prodigious private commentary, all under still more private correction,
with which, in these days, I overscored their full hours. They had shown
me from the first a facility for everything, a general faculty which,
taking a fresh start, achieved remarkable flights. They got their little
tasks as if they loved them, and indulged, from the mere exuberance of
the gift, in the most unimposed little miracles of memory. They not
only popped out at me as tigers and as Romans, but as Shakespeareans,
astronomers, and navigators. This was so singularly the case that it had
presumably much to do with the fact as to which, at the present day,
I am at a loss for a different explanation: I allude to my unnatural
composure on the subject of another school for Miles. What I remember
is that I was content not, for the time, to open the question, and that
contentment must have sprung from the sense of his perpetually striking
show of cleverness. He was too clever for a bad governess, for a
parson's daughter, to spoil; and the strangest if not the brightest
thread in the pensive embroidery I just spoke of was the impression I
might have got, if I had dared to work it out, that he was under some
influence operating in his small intellectual life as a tremendous
incitement.

If it was easy to reflect, however, that such a boy could postpone
school, it was at least as marked that for such a boy to have been
"kicked out" by a schoolmaster was a mystification without end. Let me
add that in their company now--and I was careful almost never to be out
of it--I could follow no scent very far. We lived in a cloud of music
and love and success and private theatricals. The musical sense in each
of the children was of the quickest, but the elder in especial had a
marvelous knack of catching and repeating. The schoolroom piano
broke in