ther for good or ill, at all events that superstition returned
me to my family. On reaching Granard, I felt, of course, fatigued,
and soon went to bed, where I slept soundly. It was not, however, a
dreamless sleep: I thought I was going along a strange path to some
particular place, and that a mad bull met me on the road, and pursued
me with such speed and fury that I awoke in a state of singular terror.
That was sufficient; my mind had been already wavering, and the
dream determined me. The next morning after breakfast I bent my steps
homewards, and, as it happened, my return took a weighty load of bitter
grief from the heart of my mother and family. The house I stopped at
in Granard was a kind of small inn, kept by a man whose name was Peter
Grehan. Such were the incidents which gave rise to the tale of "The Poor
Scholar."

I was now growing up fast, and began to feel a boyish ambition of
associating with, those who were older and bigger than myself. Although
miserably deficient in education--for I had been well beaten but never
taught--yet I was looked upon as a prodigy of knowledge; and I can
assure the reader that I took very good care not to dispel that
agreeable delusion. Indeed, at this time, I was as great a young
literary coxcomb as ever lived, my vanity being high and inflated
exactly in proportion to my ignorance, which was also of the purest
water. This vanity, however, resulted as much from my position and
circumstances as from any strong disposition to be vain on my part.
It was generated by the ignorance of the people, and their extreme
veneration for any thing in the shape of superior knowledge. In fact,
they insisted that I knew every earthly subject, because I had been a
couple of years at Latin, and was designed for a priest. It was useless
to undeceive men who would not be convinced, so I accordingly gave them,
as they say, "the length of their tether;" nay, to such, purpose did I
ply them with proofs of it, that my conversation soon became as fine a
specimen of pedantic bombast as ever was uttered. Not a word under
six feet could come out of my lips, even of English; but as the best
English, after all, is but commonplace, I peppered them with vile
Latin, and an occasional verse in Greek, from St. John's Gospel, which
I translated for them into a wrong meaning, with an air of lofty
superiority that made them turn up their eyes with wonder. I was then,
however, but one of a class which still exists,