"Oh, don't interfere--you make it all mixed up in my head."
Then he would be let alone for a little. Then he would put the slate
down with an expression of despair and resignation; if my sister took no
notice he would say: "I thought Mamma told you to help me in my sums?
How can I understand without having it explained to me?" It was
impossible to get the last word; indeed he used to give my sister
Maggie, when she taught him, what he called "Temper-tickets," at the end
of the lesson; and on one occasion, when he was to repeat a Sunday
collect to her, he was at last reported to my mother, as being wholly
intractable. This was deeply resented; and after my sister had gone to
bed, a small piece of paper was pushed in beneath her door, on which was
written: "The most unhappiest Sunday I ever spent in my life. Whose
fault?"

Again, when Maggie had found him extremely cross and tiresome one
morning in the lessons she was taking, she discovered, when Hugh at
last escaped, a piece of paper on the schoolroom table, on which he had
written

"Passionate Magey
Toodle Ha! Ha!
The old gose."

There was another story of how he was asked to write out a list of the
things he wanted, with a view to a birthday that was coming. The list
ended:

"A little compenshion goat, and
A tiny-winy train, and
A nice little pen."

The diminutives were evidently intended to give the requirements a
modest air. As for "compenshion," he had asked what some nursery animal
was made of, a fracture having displayed a sort of tough fibrous
plaster. He was told that it was made of "a composition."

We used to play many rhyming games at that time; and Hugh at the age of
eight wrote a poem about a swarm of gnats dancing in the sun, which
ended:

"And when they see their comrades laid
In thousands round the garden glade,
They know they were not really made
To live for evermore."

In one of these games, each player wrote a question which was to be
answered by some other player in a poem; Hugh, who had been talked to
about the necessity of overcoming some besetting sin in Lent, wrote with
perfect good faith as his question, "What is your sin for Lent?"

As a child, and always throughout his life, he was absolutely free from
any touch of priggishness or precocious piety. He complained once to my
sister that when he was taken out walks by his elders, he heard about
nothing but "poetry and civilisation." In