Autobiography
of a Child

By
HANNAH LYNCH

New York

Dodd, Mead & Company
1899

Copyright, 1898,
By Dodd, Mead and Company

Contents

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CHILD

Chapter I. LOOKING BACKWARD.

The picture is clear before me of the day I first walked. My mother, a handsome, cold-eyed woman, who did not love me, had driven out from town to nurse's cottage. I shut my eyes, and I am back in the little parlour with its spindle chairs, an old-fashioned piano with green silk front, its pink-flowered wall-paper, and the two wonderful black-and-white dogs on the mantelpiece. There were two pictures I loved to gaze upon—Robert Emmett in the dock, and Mary Stuart saying farewell to France. I do not remember my mother's coming or going. Memory begins to work from the moment nurse put me on a pair of unsteady legs. There were chairs placed for me to clutch, and I was coaxingly bidden to toddle along, "over to mamma." It was very exciting. First one chair had to be reached, then another fallen over, till a third tumbled me at my mother's feet. I burst into a passion of tears, not because of the fall, but from terror at finding myself so near my mother. Nurse gathered me into her arms and began to coo over me, and here the picture fades from my mind.

My nurse loved me devotedly, and of course spoiled me. Most of the villagers helped her in this good work, so that the first seven years of my childhood, in spite of baby-face unblest by mother's kiss, were its happiest period. Women who do not love their children do well to put them out to nurse. The contrast of my life at home and the years spent with these rustic strangers is very shocking. The one petted, cherished, and untroubled; the other full of dark terrors and hate, and a loneliness such as grown humanity cannot understand without experience of that bitterest of all tragedies—unloved and ill-treated childhood. But I was only reminded of my sorrow at nurse's on the rare occasion of my mother's visits, or when nurse once a month put me into my best clothes, after washing my face with blue mottled soap—a thing I detested—and carried me off on the mail-car to town to report my health and growth. This was a terrible hour for me. From a queen I fell to the position of an outcast. My stepfather alone inspired me with confidence. He was a big handsome man with a pleasant voice, and he was always kind to me in a genial, thoughtless way. He would give me presents which my mother would angrily seize from me and give to her other children, not from love, for she was hardly kinder to them than to me, but from an implacable passion to wound, to strike the smile from the little faces around her, to silence a child's laughter with terror of herself. She was a curious woman, my mother. Children seemed to inspire her with a vindictive animosity, with a fury for beating and banging them, against walls, against chairs, upon the ground, in a way that seems miraculous to me now how they were saved from the grave and she from the dock.

She had a troop of pretty engaging children, mostly girls, only one of whom she was ever known to kiss or caress, and to the others she was worse than the traditional stepmother of fairy tale. It was only afterwards I learned that those proud creatures I, in my abject solitude, hated and envied, lived in the same deadly fear of her with which her cold blue eyes and thin cruel lips inspired me with.

But there were, thank God! many bright hours for me, untroubled by her shadow. I was a little sovereign lady in my nurse's kindly village, admired and never thwarted. I toddled imperiously among a small world in corduroy breeches and linsey skirts, roaming unwatched the fields and lanes from daylight until dark. We sat upon green banks and made daisy chains, and dabbled delightedly with the sand of the pond edges, while we gurgled and chattered and screamed at the swans.

The setting of that nursery biography is vague. It seemed to me that the earth was made up of field beyond field, and lanes that ran from this world to the next, with daisies that never could be gathered, they were so many; and an ocean since has impressed me less with the notion of immensity of liquid surface than the modest sheet of water we called the Pond. Years afterwards I walked out from town to that village, and how small the pond was, how short the lanes, what little patches for fields so sparsely sprinkled with daisies! A more miserable disillusionment I have not known.

I have always marvelled at the roll of reminiscences and experiences of childhood told consecutively and with coherence. Children live more in pictures, in broken effects, in unaccountable impulses that lend an unmeasured significance to odd trifles to the exclusion of momentous facts, than in story. This alone prevents the harmonious fluency of biography in an honest account of our childhood. Memory is a random vagabond, and plays queer tricks with proportion. It dwells on pictures of relative unimportance, and revives incidents of no practical value in the shaping of our lives. Its industry is that of the idler's, wasteful, undocumentary, and untrained. For vividness without detail, its effects may be compared with a canvas upon which a hasty dauber paints a background of every obscure tint in an inextricable confusion, and relieves it with sharply defined strokes of bright colour.

Jim Cochrane, my everyday papa, as I called him, was a sallow-faced man with bright black eyes, which he winked at me over the brim of his porter-measure, as he refreshed himself at the kitchen fire after a hard day's work. He was an engine-driver, and once took me on the engine with him to the nearest station, he and a comrade holding me tight between them, while I shrieked and chattered in all the bliss of a first adventure.

This is a memory of sensation, not of sight. I recall the rush through the air, the sting, like needle-points against my cheeks and eyelids, of the bits of coal that flew downward from the roll of smoke, the shouting men laughing and telling me not to be afraid, the red glare of the furnace whenever they slid back the grate opening, the whiff of fright and delight that thrilled me, and, above all, the confidence I had that I was safe with nurse's kind husband.

Poor Jim! His was the second dead face I looked upon without understanding death. The ruthless disease of the Irish peasant was consuming him then, and he died before he had lived half his life through.

Chapter II. MARY JANE.

Mary Jane was my first subject and my dearest friend. She lived in a little cottage at the top of the village that caught a tail-end view of the pond and the green from the back windows.

It is doubtful if I ever knew what calling her father followed, and I have forgotten his name. But Mary Jane I well remember, and the view from those back windows. She was older than I, and was a very wise little woman, without my outbursts of high spirits and inexplicable reveries. She had oiled black curls, the pinkest of cheeks, and black eyes with a direct and resolute look in them, and she read stories that did not amuse or interest me greatly, because they were chiefly concerned with good everyday boys and girls. She tried to still a belief in fairies by transforming them into angels, but she made splendid daisy chains, and she could balance herself like a bird upon the branches that overhung the pond.

Here she would swing up and down in fascinating peril, her black curls now threatening confusion with the upper branches, her feet then skimming the surface of the water. It was a horrible joy to watch her and calculate the moment when the water would close over branch and boots and curls.

My first attempt to imitate her resulted in my own immersion, and a crowd to the rescue from the nearest public-house. After the shock and the pleasant discovery that I was not drowned, and was really nothing the worse for my bath, I think I enjoyed the sensation of being temporarily regarded in the light of a public personage. But Mary Jane howled in a rustic abandonment to grief. She told me afterwards she expected to be taken to prison, and believed the Queen would sentence her to be hanged. It took longer to comfort her than to doctor me.

It was some time after that before I again attempted to swing upon the branches over the pond, but contented myself with feeding the swans from the bank upon a flat nauseous cake indigenous to the spot, I believe, which a shrivelled old woman used to sell us at a stall hard by. There were flower-beds and a rural châlet near the pond, which now leads me to conclude that the green was a single-holiday resort, for I remember a good deal of cake-crumbs, orange-peels, and empty ginger-beer bottles about the place.

The old woman was very popular with us. Even when we had no pennies to spend, she would condescend to chat with us as long as we cared to linger about her stall of delights, and she sometimes wound up the conversation by the gift of our favourite luxury, a crab-apple.

I fear there was not one of us that would not cheerfully have signed away our future both here and hereafter for an entire trayful of crab-apples. Each tray held twelve, placed two and two, like school-ranks; and I know not which were the more bewitching to the eye, the little trays or the demure double rows of little apples. The child rich enough to hold out a pinafore for Bessy to wreck this harmony of tray and line by pouring twelve heavenly balls into it, asked nothing more from life in the way of pleasure.

The pride of Mary Jane's household was an album containing views of New York, whither Mary Jane's eldest brother had gone. New York, his mother told us, was in America. The difficulty for my understanding was to explain how any place so big as New York could find another place big enough to stand in. Why was New York in America and not America in New York?

Neither Mary Jane nor her mother could make anything of my question. They said you went across the sea in a ship to New York, and when they added that the sea was all water, I immediately thought that they must mean the pond, and that if I once got to the other side of it I should probably find America and New York.

Until then I had believed the other side of the pond to be heaven, because the sky seemed to touch the tops of the trees. But it was nicer to think of it as America, because there was a greater certainty of being able to get back from America than from heaven,—above all, when I was so unexpectedly made acquainted with the extremely disagreeable method by which little children are transported thither.

I do not know where nurse can have taken Mary Jane and me once. I have for years cherished the idea that it was to Cork, which was a long way off; but I am assured since that she never took me anywhere in a train, and that certainly I never was in Cork.

This is a mystery to me, for the most vivid recollection of those early years is a train journey with nurse and Mary Jane. I remember the train steaming slowly into a station: the hurry, the bustle, the different tone of voices round me, and Mary Jane's knowing exclamation, "Angela, this is Cork, one of the biggest towns of Ireland—as fine, they say, as Dublin."

Now, if I were never in Cork, never travelled with nurse and Mary Jane, will any one explain to me how I came to remember those words so distinctly? Odder still, I am absolutely convinced that nurse took my hand in an excited grasp, and led me, bewildered and enchanted, through interminable streets full of such a diversity of objects and interests as dazed my imagination like a blow. Not that I was unacquainted with city aspects; but this was all so different, so novel, so much more brilliant than the familiar capital!

I remember the vivid shock of military scarlet in a luminous atmosphere, and smiling foreign faces, and several ladies stopped to look at me and cry, "Oh, the little angel!" I was quite the ideal wax doll, pretty, delicate, and abnormally fair. I believe Mary Jane worshipped me because of the whiteness of my skin and for my golden hair.

Memories of this journey I never made and of this town I never visited do not end here. After eternal wanderings through quite the liveliest streets I have ever known, without remembrance of stopping, of entrance or greetings, I find myself in an unfamiliar room with nurse, Mary Jane, a strange lady, and my mother. My mother was dressed in pale green poplin, and looked miraculously beautiful. I know the dress was poplin, because nurse said so when I touched the long train and wondered at its stiffness.

She looked at me coldly, and said to nurse—

"That child has had sunstroke. I never saw her so red. You must wash her in new milk."

Whereupon she rang a bell, and cried out to somebody I did not see to fetch a basin of milk and a towel. I shuddered at the thought that perhaps my mother would wash my face instead of nurse, for I dreaded nothing so much as contact with that long white hand of sculptural shape.

Among the mysteries of my life nothing seems so strange to me as the depth of this physical antipathy to my mother. The general reader to whom motherhood is so sacred will not like to read of it. But to suppress the most passionate instinct of my nature, would be to suppress the greater part of my mental and physical sufferings. As a baby I went into convulsions, I am told, if placed in my mother's arms. As a child, a girl, nothing has been so dreadful to me as the most momentary endurance of her touch.

Once when I was threatened with congestion of the brain from over-study, I used to lie in frenzied apprehension of the feel of her hand on my brow, and she was hardly visible in the doorway before a nervous shudder shook my frame, and voice was left me to mutter, "Don't touch me! oh, don't touch me!" Her glance was quite as repulsive to me, and I remember how I used to feel as if some one were walking over my grave the instant those unsmiling blue eyes fell upon me. An instinct stronger than will, even in advanced girlhood, inevitably compelled me to change my seat to get without their range.

I recall this feeling, to-day quite dead, as part of my childhood's sufferings, and I wonder that the woman who inspired it should in middle life appear to me a woman of large and liberal and generous character, whose foibles and whose rough temper in perspective have acquired rather a humorous than an antipathetic aspect. But children, but girls, are not humorists, and they take life and their elders with a lamentable gravity.

On this occasion it was my mother who washed my face in new milk. The fragrance and coolness of the milk were delicious, if only a rougher and coarser hand had rubbed my cheeks.

While still submitting to the process, I stared eagerly round the room. There was a grand piano in black polished wood, the sofa was blue velvet and black wood, and the carpet a very deep blue. The air smelt of gillyflowers, and there were big bunches in several vases. Yet my mother assures me she never met me at Cork or elsewhere, never washed my face in new milk, is unacquainted with that black piano, the blue velvet sofa, and the gillyflowers.

She admits she did possess a pale green robe of poplin with an enormous train, bought for a public banquet given to distinguished Americans, but doubts if I ever saw it. Nurse, whom I questioned years after, laughed at the idea as at a nightmare.

Still that journey to Cork, Mary Jane's words and my mother's, the bowl of new milk, the green poplin dress, the blue-and-black sofa, the grand piano, and the gillyflowers, remain the strongest haunting vision of those years.

The first sampler I ever saw was worked by Mary Jane. I associate the alphabet in red and green wool with shining blue-black curls behind a bright-green tracery of foliage upon a blue sky.

Mary Jane used to sit upon a high bank, and work assiduously at her sampler. I thought her achievement very wonderful, but I own I never could see anything in coloured wools and a needle to tempt an imaginative child. So much sitting still was dull, and the slow growth of letters or sheep or flowers exasperating to young nerves on edge. My affection for Mary Jane, however, was so strong, that I gallantly endeavoured to learn from her, but it was in the butterfly season, and there was my friend Johnny Burke racing past after a splendid white butterfly.

What was the letter "B" in alternate stitches of red and green in comparison with the capture of that butterfly?

So the child, the poet tells us, is always mother of the woman, and not even the sane and sobering influence of the years has taught me that serious matters are of greater consequence than the catching of some beautiful butterfly. As I bartered childhood to agreeable impulses, so have I bartered youth and middle age, and if I now am a bankrupt in the face of diminishing impulses, who is to blame, after all, but perverse and precarious nature?

What became of Mary Jane I have never known. Upon my memory she is eternally impaled: a child of indefinite years from eight to eleven, with oily ringlets and clear black eyes, pink-cheeked, smiling, over-staid for her age (except in the matter of swinging recklessly over the pond), working samplers, telling a group of unlettered babies exceedingly moral tales, devoted to me and to a snub-nosed doll I abhorred; with inexhaustible gifts, including a complete knowledge of the views of New York, an enthusiasm for that mysterious being Mary Stuart, and an acquaintance with national grievances vaguely embodied in a terror of Queen Victoria's power over her Irish subjects.

She must have grown into a woman of principle and strong views.

Chapter III. MY BROTHER STEVIE.

I must have been about five when my sovereignty was seriously threatened by the coming of Stevie. The ceremony of arrival I do not remember. He seems to have started into my life like Jack out of his box to kneel for ever in his single attitude,—upon a sofa, with his elbows on a little table drawn up in front of the sofa, and his head resting either on one or both palms.

Do not ask me if he ever slept, lay down, or walked as other children. I have no memory of him except kneeling thus upon the parlour sofa, looking at me or out of the window with beautiful unearthly eyes of the deepest brown, full of passionate pain and revolt. Only for my tender nurse did this fierce expression soften to a wistfulness still more sad.

That Stevie's head was impressive, almost startlingly great, even eyes so young as mine could discern. Auburn hair the colour of rich toned wood, that only reveals the underlying red when the sun or firelight draws it out, and looks like heavy shadow upon a broad white forehead when no gleam is upon it; strong features not pinched but beautified by disease, and a depth and eloquence of regard such as are rarely looked for under children's lids.

The head expressed not pathos so much as tragedy. The frame I never saw; I cannot tell if Stevie were tall or dwarfed. A tipsy town nurse had dropped him down the length of two long flights of stairs, and a strong child's back was broken.

He did not bear his sorrow patiently, I fear, but with sullen courage and with a corrosive silent fretting. He hated me in envy of my health and nimble limbs, but what he hated still more than even the sight of my vivacious pleasures was any question about his health. I never saw a glance so deadly as that with which he responded to the kindly hope of Mary Jane's mamma that his back was feeling better. If a look could kill, Mary Jane had been motherless on the spot.

But alas for me! no longer a sole sovereign. My serene al fresco kingdom was invaded by the darker passions. I did not like Stevie. He was a boy a little girl might be sorry for in her better moments, but could not love.

He was querulous whenever I was near, and had a spiteful thirst for whatever I had set my heart upon. Nurse transferred the better part of her affection and attention to him. This was as it should be, but I was sadly sore about it in those unreasoning times. The little packages of round hard sweets in transparent glazed paper, pink and violet, that Jim Cochrane used to bring me home from the big shop we called the Co. (i. e., Co-operative Store), were now offered to Stevie, who took all my old privileges as his due.

Even Mary Jane would sit on the window-sill, when she should have been playing with me outside, and gaze at him in prolonged owlish fascination, drawn by the fierce pain of those suffering eyes, with their terrible tale of revolt and anger. Stevie got into the way of tolerating Mary Jane's society.

You see she could sit still for hours; she was a quiet little body who enjoyed her sampler and a book—not a creature of nerves, that raced and danced through the hours and was dropped into slumber by exhausted limbs. He would even let Mary Jane sit at his table and stroke his white hand with an air of deprecating tenderness, while he stared silently out upon the noisy green, where boys and girls were romping with straight backs and strong limbs.

What wonder this poor little fellow with the soul of a buccaneer hated us all. Did his favourite books, read and re-read, not amply reveal his tastes, though of these he never spoke? The lust of travel, of adventure, of daring deed filled his dreaming, and yet he never had the courage to ask a soul if he should one day be well and fit to meet the glory of active manhood.

Let remembrance dwell rather with this thought than upon the darker side of his temper, upon the subtle cruelty of the glance that met mine, upon the quiver of baffled desire that shook his fine nostrils and the vindictive clutch of his bloodless fingers whenever I thoughtlessly raced near him. If he gave me my first draught of the soul's bitters, I still owe him pity and sympathy, and I had my pleasures abroad to console me for his hate.

There were the wide fields and the birds, the swans on the pond, our friend the applewoman, and a band of merry shock-headed playmates outside for me. There were the seasons for my choosing: the spring lanes in their bloomy fragrance; the warm summer mornings, when it was good to sit under trees and pretend to be a bewitched palace waiting for the coming of the prince, or dabble on the brim of pool edges; the autumn luxuriance of fallen leaves, which lent the charmed excitement of rustle to our path along the lanes: and the frost of winter, with the undying joys of sliding and snowballs and the fun of deciphering the meaning of Jack Frost's beautiful pictures on the window-panes and his tricks upon the branches.

If Stevie disliked my restlessness, it gave him great satisfaction to despise my artistic sensibilities, and jeer at my lack of learning. I adored music, and often amused myself for hours at a time crooning out what I must have conceived as splendid operas, until my voice would break upon a shower of tears.

I naturally thought my wordless singing must be very beautiful to move me to such an ecstasy of emotion, and I think I enjoyed the tears even more than my melancholy howling. But Stevie did not. On the first occasion of this odd performance, he watched me in a convulsion of unjoyous laughter.

"What an awful fool you are, Angela!" he hissed, when he saw the pathetic tears begin to roll quickly down my cheeks. I rushed from the parlour, and the sweet water of artistic emotion turned into the bitter salt of chagrin.

I must have inherited this tendency from my mother's father, a music-daft Scotsman, who was never quite sure whether he was Hamlet or Bach. At long intervals he would stroll out of town by the Kildare road in an operatic cloak and a wide-leafed sombrero, to inspect us. He had a notion that I, if left to my own devices, might turn out a second Catherine Hayes, and after his visits I invariably returned to my dirges and cantatas with ardour.

During the year that Stevie lived at nurse's, visits from the people I significantly called my Sunday parents (because, I suppose, I wore my Sunday frock and shoes in their honour) were more frequent. Golden-haired little ladies, in silk frocks and poky bonnets, came and looked at me superciliously. The bland hauteur of one of those town creatures in superior raiment once maddened me to that degree (it was the dog-days, no doubt) that I walked up to the chair on which she complacently sat, and hit her cheek.

This naturally afforded my mother an excuse for pronouncing me dangerous and prolonging my absence from the family circle.

I was, I will admit, a desperate little spitfire, full of uncontrollable passion. But I had some rudimentary virtue, I am glad to know. I never lied, and I was surprisingly valiant for a delicately-built little girl.

I cannot remember the period of transition, but I suddenly see Stevie in quite a new part. The vitality and unfathomable yearning burnt themselves out of his eyes, and there was a wearied gentleness in them even for me. He would watch me quiescently without envy or bitterness, and speak to me in slow unfamiliar tones. He turned with indifference from his books, and seemed to know no active desires.

"Does your back hurt, Stevie?" I asked, staring at him solemnly. Even now I can feel the moving sadness of his grave look.

"It always hurts;" and then he added, with a ring of his old spite, "but you needn't be sorry for me, Angela."

"I am sorry, ever so sorry, Stevie," I sobbed, not knowing why.

"I wasn't good to you at all," he muttered, dreamily.

"Oh, I don't mind now. I'm fonder of you, Stevie. I wish you'd get well, I do. I wouldn't mind being ill to keep you company."

"I think I'd be fond of you, Angela, if I got well. Would you mind," he looked at me uneasily for help in his awkwardness, and then a little pink colour came into his cheek, and he spoke so low that it was hard to hear him—"I think I'd like you to put your arms round my neck and kiss me, Angela."

It was our first kiss and our last. The impulsive affection of my embrace pleased him, and he kept my cheek near his for some moments, while in silence we both gazed out upon the blotch of dusty green that mingled with the pale blue of the sky. I feared to move or even wink an eyelid, this new mood of Stevie's so awed me.

"You may have my books and my penknife," said Stevie, breaking the spell. "They're awful nice books. Grandpa gave them to me. I'll explain the pictures to-morrow. But perhaps you wouldn't like boys' books, Angela," he said, dejectedly, and scanned my face in a humble way.

"Oh yes, I would," I cried, eagerly.

"Then you'll be fonder of me," he sighed, satisfied. "Grandpa once read me about a little boy that was ill like me, and he had a sister. He was very fond of her. He didn't hate people that are well, like me, but I don't think that's true, Angela. A boy can't feel good and nice if he is always in pain, can he? It wouldn't be so hard for little girls, for they don't mind sitting still so much."

This, I think, is how he talked, musingly, with none of the old vehement revolt of voice and glance that still lingers with me as the most vivid interpretation of his personality.

"I can't believe any boy was ever like that queer little fellow. I wonder, if grandpa knew I wanted it very much, would he bring out that book and read it all over again to me. I want to see if it's realler."

I drew my arms away from his neck, and ran off screaming for nurse to drive into town, and tell grandpa to come and read about a sick little boy to Stevie.

Nurse came to him, ready to do his slightest behest. I still see her standing looking at him anxiously, and see lifted to her that awful quietude of gaze, out of a face sharply thinned so suddenly.

"Bring me some gingerbread-nuts and lots of pipes to blow bubbles with," he said, and I felt the childish request soothed nurse's alarm.

"Faith, an' ye'll have them galore, my own boy," she cried, "if nurse has to walk barefoot to Dublin for them."

Mary Jane's mother came over to stay with us while nurse drove off to town. Stevie knelt in his eternal position, with his cheek against his open palm and cushions piled around him. He did not speak, but stared out of the window.

I went and sat with "Robinson Crusoe" on the window-ledge, to watch nurse's departure and wave my hand to her. Not to wave my hand from the window and blow kisses to her would be to miss the best part of the fun of this unexpected incident.

The world outside rested in the unbroken stillness of noon. When nurse was out of sight, I turned to acquaint Stevie with the fact. His eyes were shut. So he remains in my memory, a kneeling statue of monumental whiteness and stillness.

A strange way for a little lad to die! Not a sigh, not a stir of hand or body, not a cry, no droop of head or jaw. A long, silent stare upon the sunny land, lids quietly dropped, and then the long unawakeable sleep. To my thinking it was an ideal close to a short life of such unrest and pain and misery. It was indeed rest robbed of all the horrors of death.

The horror remained for one who loved him, and this was no blood relative, but an ignorant nurse. Mary Jane's mamma came to see how matters were with the children. Stevie, as I thought, still slept, kneeling with his cheek upon his palm, and elbow resting on a cushion between it and the table. She looked at him quickly, flung up her hands, and trembled from head to foot. Then she bethought herself of me, and ordered me to go and sit with my book in the garden, and keep very still.

That was a long afternoon. I thought nurse would never come back. I had looked at all the pictures, spoken to each flower, hunted for ladybirds, and solaced myself with operatic diversion. Now I wanted to go back to Stevie, but the door was shut against me and the blinds were all drawn down, though it was not night—the sun had not even begun to dip westward.

Judge my delight to catch the sound of wheels along the road. I raced down to the gate to meet nurse and see all the wonders from town. Grandpa was not with her, and she came up the little path swinging her basket blithely.

"They knew the book at once, and I've got it—'tis by a man called Dickens. Your grandpa and mamma will come to-morrow and read it. They're giving a grand party to-night. Such a power of flowers and jellies and things. But the pipes I've brought Stevie in dozens and gingerbread-nuts galore."

Then her eye fell upon the blinded windows, and the colour flew from her blooming rustic face. She was nearly as white as Stevie inside. She flung away her basket, and the pipes, the book, and cakes rolled out on the gravel, to my amazement. More wonderful still, she broke out in wild guttural sounds and whirled around in a dance of madness.

I had never seen a grown person behave so oddly, and it enchanted me. I caught her skirt and began to spin round too in an ecstasy of shrill sympathy. She looked down at me in a queer wild way, as if she had never seen me before and resented my kindness, and then she cast me from her with such unexpected force that I fell among the flower-beds, too astounded to cry. Decidedly, grown-up people, I reflected, are hard to understand.

I had given up wondering at all the unusual things that happened the rest of that day. People kept coming and going, and spoke softly, often weeping. Nobody paid the least attention to me, though I repeatedly asserted that I was hungry. Then at last a comparative stranger took me into the kitchen, and made me a bowl of bread and milk. She forgot the sugar, and I was very angry. Big people often do forget the essential in a thoughtless way.

Men, too, came pouring in, and talked in undertones, looking at me as if I had been naughty. I resented those looks quite as much as the unwonted neglect of my small person, and was cheered, just upon the point of tears, by the appearance of Mary Jane, who invited me to go home and sleep with her that night.

I did not object. I never objected to any fresh excitement, and I was fond of Mary Jane's brindled cat. But why did Mary Jane cry over me and treat me as a prisoner all next day? She managed to keep me distracted in spite of her tears, and I slept a second night with the brindled cat in my arms, quite happy.

The second day of imprisonment did not pass so well. I was restless, and wanted to see Stevie again. I wanted several things that nobody seemed to understand, and I moped in a corner and wept, miserable and misunderstood. On the morning of the third day I could bear my lot no longer. I scorned Mary Jane's hollow friendship, and ran away without hat or jacket.

Outside nurse's gate knots of villagers were gathered in their best clothes. It looked like Sunday. I ran past them and shot in through the open hall-door. Nobody saw me, and I made straight for Stevie's room, which he never left before noon. I felt a rogue, and smiled in pleased recognition of the fact. How glad Stevie would be to see me!

The door was ajar, and I entered cautiously. On Stevie's bed I saw a long queer box with a lid laid beside it, and there was quite a quantity of flowers, and tapers were lit upon a table beside the bed. Was Stevie going away? But what use were candles when the sun was shining as brightly as possible?

I wanted to see what was inside the box, and drew over a chair which enabled me to climb upon the bed. Anger shook me like a frenzy. To put sick Stevie in a horrid box! Whoever heard of such a monstrous thing? It was worse than any of the dreadful things the wicked fairies did in stories.

They had taken care, I noted, to pad the box with nice white satin to make it soft; and they put a pretty new nightgown, with satin and white flowers all over it, on Stevie. All the same, I was not going to be softened by these small concessions of cruel people. Stevie I supposed to be in a bewitched sleep, like the poor princess, and I was determined to save him. I did not blame nurse. I imagined she was down-stairs in enchanted slumber too. I would save her afterwards.

After calling passionately on Stevie, touching his face, which was colder than stone, I slipped my hands over him down the sides of the box, nearly toppling in myself in the energy of labour.

I see myself now, with pursed lips and frowning brows, panting in the extremity of haste. At last my hands met under the poor narrow shoulders, and I proceeded to drag the body out of the box.

I had nearly accomplished the feat, and Stevie's head and one arm hung over the side, when the door opened and my stepfather stood upon the threshold, dazed with horror, I can now believe. His look so terrified me that I clambered down from the chair, with an inclination to cry.

"What have they done to Stevie?" I gasped, as I saw him gently lift back the dark head and desecrated limb.

My stepfather's eyes brimmed over, and he took me into his arms, murmuring vague words about heaven and angels, with his wet cheek pressed upon mine. This was how I learnt that Stevie was dead.

Chapter IV. THE LAST DAYS OF HAPPINESS.

After the vivid impression of Stevie's death, the days are a blank. Memory only revives upon a fresh encounter with my kind.

A little boy, a friend of my parents, was sent down to nurse's to gain strength by a first-hand acquaintance with cows' milk and the life of the fields. Louie was an exciting friend. He had the queerest face in the world, like that of an old and wrinkled baby's, for mouth a comical slit, and two twinkling grey eyes as small as a pig's. His hair was white, and he grinned from morning till night, so that, like the Cheshire cat, he rises before me an eternal grin.

He taught me a delightful accomplishment, which afforded me entertainment for several months—the repetition of nursery rhymes. He possessed a book of this fanciful literature, and his private store as well was inexhaustible.

We spent a day of misery together once because he could not remember the end of one that began—

"There was an old man who supposed

The street door was partially closed."

For nights I dreamed of that old man, and wondered and wondered what happened because of his error about the street door. I beheld him, grey-haired, with a nightcap on his hair, with a dressing-gown wrapped round him and held in front by one hand, while the other grasped a candle, and the old man looked fearfully over his shoulder at the door. I must have seen something to suggest this clear picture, but I cannot tell what it was.

Sometimes his face underwent all sorts of transformations, resembled in turn every animal I had ever seen and several new monsters I was unacquainted with. The eyes changed places with the mouth and the ears distorted themselves into noses. Before I had done with him, he had become quite a wonderful old man.

Our great amusement was to repeat the rhymes in a way of our own invention, taking turns to be chief and echo. This was how we did it:—

Louie. "There was an old man of the

Angela. Hague

Louie. Whose ideas were extremely

Angela. vague.

Louie. He built a

Angela. balloon

Louie. To examine the

Angela. moon,

Louie. This curious old man of the

Angela. Hague."

My passionate admiration of the courage of the young lady of Norway made me always insist on taking the principal part when it came to her turn. The neighbors used to drop in of an evening, and add the enthusiasm of an audience to our own. They were specially proud of me as almost native-grown, and my eagerness to show off the attractions of the young lady of Norway generally resulted in my suppressing Louie's final rhyme. This was what we made of it:—

Angela. "There was a young lady of

Louie. Norway

Angela. Who occasionally sat in the

Louie. doorway;

Angela. When the door squeezed her

Louie. flat,

Angela. She exclaimed, 'What of

Louie. that?'

Angela. This courageous young lady of

Louie. Norway."

Poor Louie, I learnt years afterwards, went to the dogs, and was despatched to the Colonies by an irate father. He was last heard of as a music-hall star at Sydney.

What sends bright and laughing children forth to a life of shame? Louie was the kindest little comrade on earth, unselfish, devoted, and of a tenderness only surpassed by my nurse's. Was this not proved when I began to droop and pine, missing the picture of Stevie kneeling on his sofa and staring out of the window?

I cannot say how long after Stevie's death it was before this want broke out as a fell disease. I worried everybody about the absence of that tragic face, and plied nurse with unanswerable questions. Neither Mary Jane nor the brindled cat, not even the applewoman and her tempting trays, nor the pond, nor my new terrier-pup that often washed my face, had power to comfort me.

I went about disconsolate, and was glad of a listener to whom it was all fresh, to discourse upon heaven and the queer means that were taken to despatch little children thither—an ugly box, when wings would be so much prettier.

Louie listened to me as I, with a burning cheek, told the roll of my sorrows and unfolded my ideas of the mysteries that surrounded me. Louie was not an intelligent listener, but he made up for his deficiency by an exquisite sense of comradeship. He would hold my hand and protest in the loudest voice that it was a shame, the while I suspect his mind ran on those nursery rhymes. But he loved me, there can be no doubt of that. I think he meant to marry me when we grew up.

I know when illness and a dreadful cough overtook me, he would let me lie on the floor with my head in his lap, while the exertion of coughing drew blood from my ears and nose. This too, he cried, was an awful shame.

I once saw him watch me through a convulsion with tears in his eyes, and I was immediately thrilled with the satisfaction of being so interesting and so deeply commiserated. It filled me with the same artistic emotion that followed my appreciation of the melancholy of my wordless singing.

Deep down in the heart of childhood—even bitterly suffering childhood—is this dramatic element, this love of sensation, this vanity of artist. So much of childhood is, after all, make-believe, unconscious acting. We are ill, and we cannot help noting the effect of our illness upon others. The amount of sympathy we evoke in grown-up people is the best evidence of our success as experimental artists with life. Even when we cower under a bed to weep away from our kind, we secretly hope that God or our guardian angel is watching us and feeling intensely sorry for us; and our finest conception of punishment of cruel elders is their finding us unexpectedly dead, and their being consumed with remorse for their flagrant injustice to such virtue as ours.

Who can limit the part as admiring audience a child condemns his guardian angel to play? For him, when humanity is cold and unobservant—as humanity too often is in the eyes of childhood—does he so gallantly play the martyr, the hero, the sufferer in proud silence. For his admiration did a little sister of mine once put her hand in the fire. She thought it was heroic, like the early Christians, and hoped her guardian angel would applaud, while common elders shouted in angry alarm.

Ah, never prate so idly of the artlessness and the guilelessness of children. They are as full of vanity and innocent guile and all the arts and graces as the puppies and kittens we adore.

How much, for instance, had the hope of praise and admiration to do with Louie's magnanimous kindness in that affair of the gipsies? I lay ill and exhausted from coughing on the sofa when he rushed in, panting with eagerness, to tell me that the gipsies had arrived over-night and were camped on the green, where they had a merry-go-round. I had never seen a gipsy, but Mary Jane had, and she often told me the most surprising things about them—how dark they were, how queerly they spoke, and how romantic they looked, like strange people in story-books. Of course I pined to see them, and the thought that I was chained to my sofa, when outside the world was all agog, and rapture awaited happier children upon the green, filled my eyes with tears.

I turned my face to the wall and wept bitterly. My heart was heavy with the sombre hate of Cain, and when I looked gloweringly at the blest little Abel by my side, he looked quite as miserable as my evil, envious heart could desire. His comic face underwent a variety of contortions before finally he made up his mind to blurt out an offer to forego the pleasures of the green, and stay with me.

But I was not a selfish child, and generosity always spurred me to emulation. Besides, I was already greatly comforted by the extent of Louie's sympathy, so I ordered him off to see the gipsies, and come back and tell me what a merry-go-round was like.

Still I did not mend, in spite of all nurse's care and tenderness, and it was decided to remove me to town. This was the decision of my stepfather, who was probably nervous since Stevie had dropped out of life in that quick and quiet way.

How well I remember the last day among all my dear friends! Mary Jane, Louie, and I, hand in hand, walked about all our favourite spots. The applewoman gave me an entire trayful of crab-apples, and wished I might come back with my rosy cheeks. I asked her to kiss me, and then she thrust a bun into my hand, and said huskily, "God bless you, my little lady!"

We went across to Mary Jane's, and I had a conviction that my heart was broken. I was going away into the land of the ogres and witches, and though I should probably be happy at last, since all things come right in children's tales, vague terror held me at the prospect of the unknown trials that awaited me. Mary Jane's mamma gave me raspberry vinegar and my tears mingled with the syrup. I asked to be let look once more at the views of New York, and then asked her if she would feel very sorry at my death.

They were still consoling me, and I was sobbing wildly in the arms of Mary Jane's mamma, while Louie relieved his stricken soul by protesting repeatedly that "it was an awful shame," when nurse and Jim Cochrane, in his Sunday clothes, came to carry me off to the car. All the village flocked to see me off, and breathed cordial love and benediction upon my departure.

Kindly Irish peasants, with their pretty speech and pretty manners! Is there any other race whose common people can throw such warmth and natural grace into greetings and farewell? Big-hearted, foolish, emotional children, upon whose sympathetic faces, at their ugliest, still play the smiles and frowns, the lights and shadows of expressive and variable childhood. How they cheered and soothed me with their kind words, their little gifts, their packages of comfits and posies, a blue-and-white mug with somebody else's name in gilt letters upon it, and a tiny plate with a dog in a circle of fascinating white knobs.

This was the end of my brief sovereignty. Though of those old associations, for which I was destined to yearn so passionately many a year, memory may have become so dim as to leave only a trace of blurred silhouettes upon an indistinct background emerging from a haze of multiplied experience, I like to think that I owe to that bright start the humour and courage that have served to help me through a clouded life.

Chapter V. MARTYRDOM.

It would seem that happiness imprints itself more clearly and more permanently upon the mind than misery. Beyond a sense of enduring wretchedness, I can recall very little of my home life.

My sisters had a big play-room at the top of the house. Here they had ladders, which they used to rest in the four corners and climb up, pretending they were climbing up great mountains. They were much more learned than I in the matter of pretence and games. They knew all sorts of things, and could pretend anything. They had been to the pantomime, and could dance like the fairies. One of them had a brilliant imagination, and told lovely stories. In the matter of invention I have never since met her equal in children of either sex; but she was apt to carry experiment too far, for reading of somebody that hanged himself by tying a handkerchief round his neck and attaching it to a nail on the wall, she immediately proceeded to test the efficacy of the method upon the person of a pretty stepsister of four, whom she worshipped.

The child was beginning to turn colour already at the moment of rescue, and then followed the solitary instance of my stepfather's punishing one of us.

But my sisters were not kinder to me than my mother. I was an alien to them, and I loved strangers. They could not understand a sensitiveness naturally morbid, and nurtured upon affection. It was impossible that they could escape the coarsening influence of my mother's extraordinary treatment and neglect of them.

Left to grow up without love or moral training, cuffed and scolded, allowed illimitable liberty from dawn to dark, they were more like boys than girls. They never kissed one another or any one else. They were straightforward, honest, rather barbarous in their indifference to sentiment, deeply attached to each other under a mocking manner, vital, and surprisingly vivid and individual for children. There was not a particle of vanity or love of dress amongst the lot, though beauty was their common heritage. Their fault was that they never considered the sensibilities of a less breezy nature; that they were rough, unkind, for the fun of the thing, and could never understand the suffering they inflicted upon me.

One of their fancies, seeing how I shrank from hardness of touch or look or voice, was to teach me how to run away from a ghost.

It was a very high house, with several flights of stairs, and two of these inquisitors would take me between them, and tear me at a running pace down the whole length of stairs, my heels lifted from the ground, and only the tips of my toes bruised against each stair. At night I would go to bed aching with pain and terror, and sob myself to sleep, yearning for the faces and sights and sounds that had passed out of my life.

Ah, what tears I shed in that strange home! To have cried in childhood as I cried then, incessantly and for months, sometimes for the greater part of the day under a bed, that none of these mocking young creatures might see me and laugh at me; to have stood so intolerably alone among so many, without a hand to dry my eyes, a kiss to comfort me, a soft breast against which I could rest my tired little head and sob out my tale of sorrow,—this is to start permanently maimed for the battle of life. What compensation can the years bring us for such injustice? Could any possible future paradise make up to us for infancy in hell?

There are faces that stand out upon memory with some kindness in them for a pitiable little outcast. Chiefly, of course, my stepfather, who was as serviceably good to me as a man's unreasoning terror of a woman's temper permitted him to be. He saved me from many a cruel beating, and when I seemed more than usually miserable, he would, with an air of secrecy and guilt that charmed me, himself help to fasten on my hat and little coat, and carry me out upon his business calls.

They used to represent me to him as a dangerous small devil, describing my outbursts of fury but suppressing the provocation; and I once heard him exclaim angrily—"I am sick of these complaints of Angela's temper. When she is with me she is better behaved and gentler than any of them. You can twist an angel into a devil if you worry and ill-use it."

I know now that he suffered for his partisanship of me, and that he forsook my cause at last from sheer weariness of spirit and flesh. He thought it better for his own peace to leave me to the mercies of my mother, concluding probably that I should not be worse off.

Our home must have resembled the American man-of-war in the vicinity of which, the French Admiral wrote, nothing was heard from morning till night but the angry voices of the officers and the howling of trounced sailors. Up-stairs in their play-room the children were happy enough, but to venture down-stairs was the hardihood of mouse in the neighbourhood of lion. One or the other, for no reason on earth, but for the impertinent or irrational obviousness of her existence, was seized by white maternal hands, dragged by the hair, or banged against the nearest article of furniture. My mother never punished her children for doing wrong; she was simply exasperated by their inconceivable incapacity to efface themselves and "lie low." To show themselves also in her vicinity was an intolerable offence which called for instant chastisement.

Servants have been known to fly to the rescue. Once when I came home from a walk, one of the nurses complained in my mother's hearing that I had wilfully splashed my boots with mud. Instantly I was grasped, and the mystery to me to-day is how I survived such treatment. One of the servants, a delicate, fair young man, called Gerald, rushed up-stairs, scarlet with indignation, and tore me from my mother's hands. I have forgotten what he said, but he gave her notice on the spot in order to express himself more freely.

Once, again, I was rescued by a young lady in a silk gown of many shades. Her face is a blank to me, but I distinctly remember the green and purple lights of her shot-silk gown, and the novel sound of her name, Anastasia Macaulay. She had come to lunch that day, and had taken a fancy to me, which was quite enough to excite my mother. The scene is indistinct. I sat on Anastasia's lap, playing with her watch-chain, and suddenly I was on the floor, with smarting face and aching back. Anastasia saved me from worse. She sent me a picture-book and a doll, but never entered the house again.

Chapter VI. GRANDFATHER CAMERON.

The unhappiest little child that ever drew breath has immediate compensations between the dark hours undreamed of by elders. One of the persons that lent the relief of sparkle to those sombre months, and by whose aid I wandered blithely enough down the sunny avenues of imagination, which, like a straight road running into the sky, lead to Paradise, was my Scottish grandfather.

Grandpapa was a sombre-visaged little gentleman, not in the least like his formidable daughter. He had very dark eyes, and he often assured me that Stevie got his beautiful red-brown hair from him. I needed the assurance pretty frequently, for grandpapa's hair was white. He proudly drew my attention to the fact that there was not a bald spot, however.

In all ordinary matters of existence, grandpapa was of a happy facility. He tolerated every error, every crime, I believe, except a false note or an inferior taste in music. He loved me, not because of the accuracy of my ear, for I had none to speak of, but because of my instinctive passion for music. Still, in middle life, I can say there never has been for me a grief that could resist the consolation of music well interpreted.

If grandpapa found me in a corner white and dejected, he asked no questions,—he wished to be in ignorance of his daughter's domestic affairs, which was the reason, I suppose, he so sedulously avoided the society of my stepfather—but he took me off with him to hear music or singing somewhere. In winter he took me to the pantomime, and we sat in the pit, and he indulged me with an orange to suck.

In the Dublin season he took me to the Opera or the Opera-Bouffe with equal readiness. Sometimes there were morning or afternoon concerts, and I sat out with exemplary gravity sonatas and concerts or part-singing, and woke up to genial comprehension of the ballads and simple melodies.

Grandpapa had one great charm. He never spoke to me as a child, and I rarely understood the tenth of his talk. That was why, no doubt, as a personage grandpapa appealed so delightfully to my imagination. He was a mystery, a problem, a permanent excitement. A month or a year—perhaps, to be more accurate, a month—would elapse without my seeing him, and then suddenly he would again enter the chaos of dreams and visions, a smiling dark-eyed old gentleman, with a long black cloak flung round his shoulder and a slouched felt hat that left revealed his abundant white hair.

He would place a finger on his lip and say, "Hush!" so mysteriously, looking round the room. How well I, who lived in such fear of my mother's presence, understood that attitude and look.

I have since been assured that grandpapa was a harmless lunatic. If so, he made lunacy more attractive to a child than sanity.

"Hush! I have that to say to you, child, which common ears may not hear. These people call me Cameron. But, Angela, my real name is Hamlet. I was born at Elsinore. I will take you to Elsinore some day. It is far away in a country called Denmark. You yourself, Angela, look like a Dane, with your yellow hair and blue eyes. Come, there is a concert at Earlsfort Terrace. They play Bach. I will take you."

Could anything be more calculated to win a child's esteem and reverence than this assertion that the world knew him by a false name?—that he was really quite another person from the person they believed him to be? Then, what sonorous words, Hamlet, Elsinore! Denmark I liked less—it sounded more like an everyday place—but Elsinore was as good as a fairy-tale in its awful beauty.

I asked him if you went in a ship over the sea to Elsinore, as Mary Jane told me you went to America; and when he nodded and said "Yes," I got to imagine there was no common sunlight on the sea as the ship crossed it to Elsinore, but the lovely white light I had seen at the theatre when the fairies danced, and all the people in the ship wore beautiful garments of white and green gauze, and there was soft music all the way, and the water shone like silver.

What I could not understand was why I should be a Dane because my eyes were blue, when grandpapa's, who was so obviously more of a Dane than I, were black. But grandpapa always frowned, and an odd flame shot into his mild glance, if you asked him questions.

He gave you facts, and expected you to make what you could of them. He was unreasonably proud, I thought, of his Scottish blood, all the same. He was a Highlander, he said, while my grandmother, he explained contemptuously, was a Glasgow lass. My uncle Douglas, he added, favoured his side, while my mother was a blonde Ferguson. Pity it was an intelligent little girl like me did not take more after the Camerons; but I had my uncle Douglas's nose, and with a Cameron nose I need never fear the future.

This was surely an excess of faith on my grandfather's side not justified by experience. He had been only saved from the poorhouse by a thrifty and judicious if hard-hearted wife, while my splendid uncle Douglas, with his curly head of Greek god, had wandered from debt through every expensive caprice, and was drowned sailing a little pleasure-boat on one of the Killarney lakes at the inappropriate age of twenty-four.

The Cameron nose has done as little for his young brother, my uncle Willie. I have always loved the image I have made to myself of my boy-uncle Willie, chiefly, I suppose, because of his brilliant promise and early death; but largely, I believe, because not only grandpapa Cameron, but others who remember him, tell me I resemble him in character and feature.

They say it was his death, coming so soon after the blow of uncle Douglas's doom, that turned my grandfather's brain. Willie had been articled to a well-known architect, who, being musical like my grandfather, was interested in his musical friend's bright-faced and witty lad, with about as much knowledge of music as a healthy puppy. This lamentable deficiency, however, brought about no disastrous clash between master and pupil.

The distinguished architect loved Willie Cameron for his good-humour, his industry, his quickness, and his impromptu jingling rhymes. He made everything rhyme with a delicious comic absurdity, even the technical terms of his profession, and in consequence no one was jealous of the master's preference for his funny Scottish pupil. You see, he was so much more of an Irish than a Scottish lad. Born on Irish soil, he seems to have inherited the best of native virtues, and was universally beloved. Even his eldest sister, who never sinned on the side of tenderness, could not speak of uncle Willie without a smile.

So there were universal congratulations when Willie, barely of age, got his first commission. No one accused the architect of favouritism, though the first commission of a son could not have been of greater moment to him. Uncle Willie posted triumphantly off to the country, and the master told him to telegraph for his presence in the event of doubt or difficulty. The season was wet, and uncle Willie reached his inn that night drenched and shivering. They put him into damp sheets. The next day was no drier, and uncle Willie drove off on a car in the rain. It was his last drive alive. Ten days later what remained of him was driven to the cemetery amid plumes and crape and white flowers.

It was curious that while grandpapa Cameron was always ready to speak of his handsome son Douglas, of Willie, whom he loved best, he only spoke to me once,—that was when he showed me an indefinite boy's picture, and curtly told me it was my uncle Willie's portrait, and added, dreamily, that I was the only one of his grandchildren who resembled Willie.

That fact, perhaps, had more to do than my musical proclivities with his preference for me. He would give me five-shilling pieces from time to time, and beg me "not to mention it." I took the pieces gratefully, pleased with their brightness and largeness; but I own I found pennies more useful. A child can buy almost anything for a penny, but the only use of a silver five-shilling piece seemed to me to be able to look at it from time to time. Had I known anything of arithmetic, I might have calculated how many pennies were contained in these big silver pieces, and have changed them for an inexhaustible store of my favourite coin.

But I was not clever enough to think of this, and by the time I was sent across the sea to school in Warwickshire a year later, I had as many as six five-shilling pieces in a box, which then did stout service in supplying cakes and sweets on the scarce occasions I was allowed to make such needful investments.

Grandpapa Cameron lived in a little cottage out of town, with a long back-garden, where he spent his time cultivating roses. He had a disagreeable old cook and a red-nosed gardener, and he saw no society but a couple of priests, who took it in turn to drop in of an evening to play cribbage.

On Sunday he went to the one church where Mozart's and Beethoven's masses were sung. Once a new hardy organist with a fanciful French taste introduced Gounod.

My grandfather's face changed. He cocked an indignant ear, turned abruptly in his seat facing the altar, and looked long and angrily up at the choir. The horrid and sentimental strains of Gounod continued, and, unable to bear it any longer, my grandfather clapped his hat over his eyes, with a disregard for the religious prejudices of his neighbours no less brutal than the new organist's disregard for his musical sensibilities.

He walked out of church, and meditated upon his protest for a week. When I mention my belief that my grandfather had only become a convert from Scottish Presbyterianism to Roman Catholicism because of Mozart's and Beethoven's masses, it will be recognised what a desperately serious matter for him was this impertinent introduction of light French music into church.

He succeeded in gathering a cluster of musical maniacs, one of whom was his friend the distinguished architect. The four planted themselves, with arms folded and furious purpose in their eyes, not in the least like Christians come to Sunday prayers, but like heroes bent upon showing an uncompromising front to injury. They heard in silence the opening roll of the organ, then the thin sweetness of Monsieur Gounod's religious strains filled the church, and the faithful sat up to listen to the Kyrie Eleison.

A distinct and prolonged hiss burst from the lips of the four musical maniacs, and my grandfather began to pound his stick upon the floor with an eloquence that left no one in doubt as to how he would treat the organist's head if he had it within reach. The officiating priests glanced round in surprise and astonishment. People rubbed their eyes, and wondered if they were dreaming.

There sat the four maniacs, hissing, booing, knocking their sticks on the floor, and "ohing" as they do in the House of Commons. Surprise was effaced in consternation, and a priest came down to the miscreants from the altar.

"Let that fellow stop his French nonsense and we'll stop too," shouted my grandfather. "I've been coming to this church for the past twenty-five years, and during that time have paid bigger fees than any of my neighbours. Why? Because there was a decent feeling for music here. Because you respected yourselves and gave us the best. But if you're going to degrade yourselves and follow an ignoble fashion and adopt French fads—well, sir, I swear I'll wreck the church—I will indeed."

The fight ended in my grandfather's defeat, and he never put his foot again into church. He carried his indignation so far as to insult an old French acquaintance, Monsieur Pruvot, the manager of a large wine house. Still sore upon the triumph of Gounod, he was accosted affably by Monsieur Pruvot, who cried out to him, waving his hat—

"How do you do, my dear Monsieur Camerone?"

"My name's Cameron, and I'm Mister, none of your damned French Monsieurs, Mr. Pruvot," roared my grandfather, pronouncing the mute t of the Frenchman's name with a vicious emphasis.

It is easy to imagine the amazement of the Frenchman, in ignorance of the Beethoven-Gounod episode, and who until then had always found my grandfather a genial and inoffensive neighbour. He made, by way of insinuating concessions to wrath, a complimentary remark upon "this charming little town of Dublin," pronouncing it in the French way.

"We call it Dublin, sir. Yes, I've no doubt it is a finer town than your native Bordox. I see no reason, sir, why we in Dublin should treat your town with a courtesy you, residing here, deny ours. If you can't learn to say Dublin, we may well decline to say Bordeaux. A very good morning, Mr. Pruvot."

Poor grandpapa Cameron! This was his last battle on earth, either in the interests of Beethoven or Dublin. A few days later he was found in bed with his face to the wall—dead.

Chapter VII. PROFILES OF CHILDHOOD.

The flow of the day in my city home is lost for me. But pictures and portraits stand out, sometimes blurred, sometimes surprisingly distinct, upon a confused background. There was food enough for curiosity and dreaming in the pauses of suffering. I must have lived for several days in an enchanted world solely by the single glimpse I had of my godfather.

He had sent me a present of a book about cocks and hens, largely illustrated. I was sitting in the store-room poring over it in the dreary society of Mrs. Clement, the new housekeeper. The previous one, Mrs. Dudley, I remember vaguely as a stern unsympathetic person, with crimped iron-grey hair under a voluminous cap trimmed with puce ribbons. She once forced me to swallow a Gregory-powder in a delusive snare of black-currant jam. I must have swallowed medicines before and since, and yet the taste and smell and look of that nauseous powder are still with me whenever my mind reverts to those days. Hence my delight when I learned that Mrs. Dudley was going away, and my cordial welcome of her successor, Mrs. Clement.

"So she's in here," somebody cried, rapping with a stick upon the door ajar.

I looked up from my book and saw a wonderful sight, of which I was afterwards vividly reminded in a French school by a picture of the famous "Postillon de Longjumeau," a jaunty figure with a pointed black beard and a tall wide-brimmed hat on one side. He bore himself gallantly, wore top-boots, a long coat with several little capes to it, and carried a smart riding-whip in his hand. This was my godfather.

I had never seen him before, and to my lasting regret I have never seen him since. He was out in '48, was proscribed, and had wandered about strange lands. He died in China, having first sent my mother a pretty case of Imperial tea, which she distributed in minute portions to all her friends, measuring the tea out with a small silver egg-cup. As fast as each consumed her portion, she returned for another, and as my mother had always a greater pleasure in giving than in receiving, my godfather's present was soon exhausted.

I remember being swung up in the air and shrieking in pretended fright, for children, sensational and dramatic little creatures, must persuade themselves there is an element of peril and adventure in their tamest diversions. Not to imagine oneself afraid is to miss the peculiar zest of enjoyment.

When I was seated gravely on his knee, my godfather asked me to spell out a few lines of his book.

"Cocks and hens—eh? Just suit a little girl from the country," he laughed, helping me to hold the book.

"I had a little dog at Mamma Cochrane's. I liked it better than cocks and hens," I protested meekly.

"Wants a dog now, does she? Queer little woman! She's still too pale, Mrs. Clement, much too pale and thin. Fretting for her Mamma Cochrane, I suppose. Well, I'll see if I can't get her a nice dog with curly hair, that'll cry 'Bow-wow' when you pull its tail. Know where China is, missy?"

I had heard of a china doll, and my Mamma Cochrane had two beautiful black-and-white china dogs. I supposed at once that China was a land where the dogs and dolls were all of china, and I wondered if the people were of china too. My godfather laughed as only a big man with a beard seems to be able to laugh. I was sure you could hear him down in the hall and up in the nursery. It was very comforting, that loud laugh, and I became instantly communicative, and told him all I knew about America and New York. He said it took a much bigger boat to go to China, which was farther off than New York, and that there were crocodiles in the rivers that ate men, and there was so much sunshine that the people were quite yellow.

After that, whenever it was unusually sunny, I was safe to astonish somebody by saying I supposed it was always like that in China. Somehow, the image of my jovial godfather was melted in a great glare of yellow light, through which yellow faces came and went, up and down long rivers, where unknown monsters, understood to be crocodiles, tossed about in a ruthless quest of man.

Mrs. Clement, the housekeeper, is another portrait that stands out in luminous relief from a crowd of unremembered faces. Her dress was seemingly as unalterable as a uniform. It consisted of a black silk gown, very wide at the base and gathered in at a slim waist, a white lawn fichu trimmed with delicate lace, and fastened with a gold brooch containing the features of a young man with a dark moustache.

I never dared to ask her who the young man was. She was kind to me, but she kept me at arm's-length by her terrible sadness, and infant curiosity was the last thing she encouraged. Her face was pale, her thin yellow hair was pale, and her blue eyes were pale. Those faded hues suited the melancholy of her smile and regard.

Seeing me persecuted and unhappy, she took me under her protection, and would let me sit for hours at her feet in the storeroom, while she mended linen.

I read to her, and when I was tired of reading I told her stories of my past. Like grown-up mourners, it relieved me to talk of my sorrow and describe the paradise down there beside the pond and the applewoman's stall.

She listened with mild interest, and I was not so engrossed in my own troubles as not to remark the sadness of Mrs. Clement. The children up-stairs were sure she had committed some dreadful murder, and was brooding in remorseful reminiscence. They did not like her, because she once scolded them for their treatment of me; but nothing they could say would induce me to think ill of my melancholy friend, and I continued to sit at her feet and watch her in wonder and awe.

Her niece Eily came into our service shortly afterwards. She had a beautiful fresh face like a wild-flower, made up of sweet dark-blue eyes, a blossom of a mouth, and morning hues upon her cheek. She was a girl made to beguile sense and sternness, and transform the lion to a lamb. Everybody immediately loved her, she had such a delicious way of saying "Ah, sure!" and lifting up a pair of the most Irish of eyes in bewitching appeal.

My parents adopted her as a sort of daughter, and a mere hint of a lover at her heels was enough to wake the Quixote in my stepfather. They married her afterwards to a promising young Englishman, my father giving her away and my mother supplying the trousseau.

The Englishman was so enamoured of all things Irish that he gave the most flagrantly Hibernian names to his children, in opposition to Eily's romantic tastes, who adored every out-of-the-way name of fiction. When I met them, years afterwards, his affected drawl and pretty suspicion of lisp managed to give a foreign charm to our common name "Paddy," by which the eldest boy was called.

Eily's face was just the same wild-flower, a little faded and drawn, and "Ah, sure!" was still on the tip of her tongue in all the beguiling glamour of Erin. But what a sad change! Tears looked fatally near the surface, and the smile was deprecating and anxious.

She had fallen from petted servitude into troubled servitude, and longed for the clatter of her aunt's household keys among the linen and china and preserve-presses of the storeroom. She longed for my stepfather's cheery "Well, Eily, little puss," and instead had to listen to an exacting husband's complaints of her deficiencies as housekeeper and sick-nurse. He had married a bird, and grumbled incessantly because it lacked the solid capacities of a cow.

"And your aunt, Eily?" I asked.

"Poor aunt died long ago. She never recovered the death of her only child, Frank, who was drowned going out to America."

So the young man in the brooch was Mrs. Clement's son, after all, and her melancholy, that had so puzzled my childhood, was not the gloom of remorse but the stamp of a common bereavement.

By the side of my grandfather's avenue of rose-trees ran a neighbour's garden. My grandfather was on nodding terms with his neighbour; but there sometimes came a bright-faced lad with a flaxen down upon his upper lip. His name caught my fancy, and I thought a fairy prince could not have a finer one. It now represents to the world a figure so very different from the vague but pleasant profile memory likes to dwell upon, that I permit myself to doubt if that kind boy and the O'Donovan Rossa of New York can be the same person.

The stripling I recall seems to me to have been eternally singing or whistling. I specially remember one song he was fond of—"Love among the Roses."

He would look across the low hedge and sing out, "Where's my little wife?" I kept it as a delightful secret from all the world that I was married to a boy called O'Donovan Rossa. The world is a cold confidant in such delicate matters, and has a way of looking as if it did not take little children seriously.

But O'Donovan Rossa had a little sister of his own whom he loved devotedly, so he knew all about little girls and their ways, and appeared to understand my conversation. So few grown-up people do understand the conversation of children, and children know this.

He would spring over the hedge just like a mythical personage, and tumble unexpectedly on the grass-plot beside me, and my daisy-chains were matter of absorbing interest to him. Then what stories he had about blue dragon-flies, humming-birds, and bewitched crows! You may imagine if I looked forward to visits to grandpapa Cameron's cottage, with such a prospective attraction.

I did not disdain the rougher friendship of Dennis, my grandfather's gardener. He was a cheery individual with a very red face. He once gave me an orange and a penny when I arrived with cheeks and eyelids swollen from crying, with a conviction that I could bear my sorrows no longer. I ate my orange, and suddenly the world seemed brighter, and when I went off alone to purchase a pennyworth of crab-apples at a fruit-shop hard by, I began to take pleasure at the thought of to-morrow.

I was further consoled by one of grandpapa's shining five-shilling pieces, and then Dennis called me to fetch him a tool, shouting, "Look sharp now, and do something for your living," and I was so enchanted that all sense of desolation and ill-usage left me.

It is so easy to make a child happy that it is a mystery to me how the art is not universal with grown-up persons.

Among the blurred memories of days so remote is a ball given in the big town house. The excitement could not but reach us up-stairs beneath the stars. The nurse and housemaid were equally aflame, and stood watching the guests from the corner of the topmost landing, that commanded a glimpse of the drawing-room lobby. The rustle of silk and the sort of perfumed chatter that belongs to gatherings in full dress reached us, broken and vague like the beautiful fancies of dreams. Our little feet pattered with yearning to be down below in the thick of social pleasures, and we shouted out our recognition of each side face as a guest crossed the lobby. It was not the brilliant assortment of silks and satins and laces, the gleam of jewelled array, or the chatter that intoxicated me; it was the first blast of music that rolled up to us, and the penetrating charm of the fiddles.

I was always less looked after than the others, and watching my opportunity, I slipped down-stairs in my nightdress; I felt I must hear those fiddles nearer, and see how people looked when they danced. Mrs. Clement saw me a few steps above the drawing-rooms, and wanted to carry me back to bed; but I prayed so hard for one look, that she took me into her arms, and, skirting the lobby, went in on tip-toe to the cardroom, at the top of the drawing-rooms, where several persons were playing at little tables. Some of the guests looked up at the melancholy lady in black silk with the little child in its night-dress, staring in bewilderment at them. But Mrs. Clement placed her finger on her lips, and they smiled at me and continued their play.

They were playing "Il Bacio," and even now I can never hear that tinkling waltz without a throb. It brought tears to my eyes then, and all night it formed the accompaniment of my dreams. The only couple I clearly saw in that paradise of colour, light, scent, and sound was my stepfather, who whirled past us with a tall dark girl in amber satin, who was smiling most radiantly as she danced.

This girl springs into my pictures of childhood in an odd inconsequent way. She was very handsome, of the sparkling brunette type, with white teeth, and hard bright eyes as black as the hair that rippled low down on either temple, and was caught under the ear in an old-fashioned bunch of ringlets. She was under my mother's protection, who was very kind and generous to her, having an inscrutable liking for strangers,—above all, needy strangers. She was a woman to turn her back inevitably upon a friend in prosperity, and court him in poverty. There was nothing of the snob in my mother, I must admit.

Another vivid picture I have of this young girl is a gloomier and more impressive one. I cannot tell why I was chosen for that drive. I suppose it was because I looked so delicate and unhappy that my stepfather insisted on having me. He drove a pair of spirited horses, and I sat opposite my mother and the dark young girl. She did not smile once that day, and the extreme sadness of her face riveted my attention. I thought I had never seen any one so beautiful and interesting, and I wondered why her eyes kept continually filling with tears.

She and my mother whispered mysteriously from time to time, and the disconnected words that reached my ears were no enlightenment for my puzzled brain. Ordinarily I was too dreamy or too excited to have much curiosity for my fellows. I preferred my own thoughts to speculations upon creatures so dull and undiverting as big people. But this day it was different. A brilliant young lady in long dresses, with a glittering ring upon her finger, whom my parents treated with every kindness and consideration, could be just as miserable apparently as a small neglected girl. It was truly a wonderful discovery.

We drove along the Kilmainham road, I now know, and as we went farther north, the pretty girl's tears flowed more freely, only she did not cry as we children cry. She bit her lips, and every moment thrust her handkerchief angrily into her eyes. My mother seemed to scold her for having wished to come that way, and I thought wanted to divert her attention from something the girl was evidently anxious to see.

We stopped near a large building, and there was my stepfather turned towards us and talking a strange jargon. From dint of puzzling over each word, I arrived at the extraordinary conclusion that somebody this young girl loved was in prison, that it was not wicked apparently to be locked up in prison, and that the woodwork they were gazing at, my stepfather with his hat in his hand, was something bad men were getting ready for her friend's destruction. The young girl stared up at the woodwork with streaming passionate eyes, and then buried her face in her handkerchief, and rocked from side to side in a dreadful way. We were driving on, and I gazed up to see what my stepfather was doing. He, too, was wiping away tears, and his hat was right down upon his eyes.

The mystery was solved years afterward. This girl was engaged to a political prisoner recently condemned to death. My mother used to take her to see him at Kilmainham Jail, and she had insisted on being driven round by the prison the day before the execution.

My grandmother lies farther back, a fainter picture in that world of unsatisfactory grown-up people. While she lived, her favourite present to each of her granddaughters was either a grey or green silk dress, with a poky bonnet and ribbons to match. In the grey we must have looked like little Quakeresses, and in the green like a gathering of the "gentle people" out of the moonlit woods, our proper dominion.

Her I remember indistinctly as a thin-lipped, unpleasant-looking woman, who had a fixed opinion that children must either be "saucy" or "bold." I was bold, because I was always too frightened of her to say anything, saucy or meek.

She used to lie in bed or on the parlour sofa, sipping egg-flip and reading religious books. She was very devout; but her religion, I suspect, served neither to brighten her own nor any one else's life. It had a sombre, vinegary aspect, more concerned with punishment due than pleasure merited, more attuned to severity than Christian mildness.

By some unaccountable process she melted out of my existence, having darkened it for some months, from which I infer that her death passed unnoted by me or was not explained to me. I did not see her dead, and can record no gentle deed of hers living. She never kissed me, but sometimes shook my hand in a loose gentlemanly fashion, and exhorted me not to be so "bold."

Once she nearly broke my heart. The cook had made some damson jam, and while I was alone in the parlour turning over the leaves of one of grandpapa's music-books, which looked so mysteriously wonderful to me, she carried in a specimen bowl, and left it on the table with some loose coppers. I still see that bowl. It was white, and had a wreath of pink roses.

When I tired of my music-book, I wandered by a natural impulse into temptation. The bowl was out of my reach, but I soon remedied that by drawing over a chair and climbing upon it. I dipped my finger into the bowl, and then put it into my mouth. It tasted, as indeed I fully anticipated, good. You may imagine the alacrity with which I continued the operation, without any heed of the blotches of jam that dropped upon the table.

Both the hall-door and parlour-door were open, and I heard loud sobbing. I was acquainted with sorrow myself, which was a reason I never heard a child's cry unmoved. I slipped off my chair, and ran out into the hall.

A ragged little follow sat on the doorstep, crying as if his heart would burst. I raced down the steps, and sat by his side to comfort him. He had cut his foot, and I asked him if it would not hurt less if he had some apples to eat. Crab-apples always soothed my own immeasurable woes and lightened the pangs of solitude for me. The weeping boy looked at me sullenly, and nodded.

In I flew again and came out with the coppers grasped in my jammy palm, and holding the bowl of damson jam tightly wedged between my pinafore and both hands.

"There's splendid jam here," I said, and invited the sufferer to dip his finger into the bowl.

He did so, and stopped crying. He was quite consoled, and nearly emptied the bowl in the avidity of his appreciation. Then I gave him the coppers, and told him the name of the shop where he could get lots of the nicest crab-apples. The hall-door was still open, and the parlour was empty when I carried back the bowl. I left it on the table, and went out into the garden to talk to Dennis.

I had no idea of having done wrong. At nurse's I was free to take what I liked, and I was not at all familiar with the sin of stealing. Judge, then, my surprise when cook came out for me with a flaming face, and assured me I "would catch it." I stopped playing, and felt chill with apprehension. What was going to happen to me now? Grandpapa was not there to protect me, and I had not much faith in Dennis's power to save me.

Cook dragged me up-stairs, scolding me all the way. She called me a thief, a robber, and said I was worse than the dreadful highwaymen they wrote of in books. I whimperingly protested. I was not a thief, I cried indignantly; I was not a robber. I did not know what a highwayman was, but I was sure I was not that either.

"Ah! you'll catch it," was all cook deigned to reply.