Memory is no longer fragmentary and episodic. Life here begins to be a story, ever broken, ever clouded, with radiant hours amid its many sadnesses, quaint and adorable surprises ever coming to dry the tears of blank despair and solitude; an Irish melody of mirth and melancholy, all sorts of unimaginable tempests of passion and tears, soothed as instantaneously as evoked, by the quickening touch of rapture and racial buoyancy. Mine was the loneliest, the most tragic of childhoods, yet I doubt if any little creature has ever been more susceptible to the intoxication of laughter, more vividly responsive to every mirthful and emotional claim of life. After my singular and enchanting experience of the police-station, where, as a rule, the hardened instruments of justice are not permitted to show themselves in so gracious and hospitable a light, it was decided to expatriate the poor little rebel beyond the strip of sullen sea that divides the shamrock shores from the home of the rose. There, at least, vagrant fancies would be safely sheltered behind high conventual walls, and the most unmerciful ladies of Mercy, in a picturesque midland town of England, were requested to train and guide me in the path I was not destined to adorn, or indeed to persevere in. Pending the accomplishment of my doom, I was removed from the centre of domestic discord and martyrdom to the suburban quiet of my grandfather's house. This decision had its unexpected compensation. The cross old cook, whom I had not seen since the day I stole her bowl of damson-jam, had disappeared to make way for Mary Ann, the divine, the mysterious, the sublime, the ever-delicious Mary Ann. Where did she come from, whither has she vanished, the soother of the sorrows of those most lamentable days? Alas! now I know the secret of her enchantment, of those perishable surprises of mood and imagination that so perpetually lifted me out of my miserable self, diverted me in my tragic gloom, and sent me to bed each night in a state of delightful excitement. Mary Ann drank punch, and on the fiery wings of alcoholism wafted herself and me, her astonished satellite, into the land of revelry and mad movement. How ardently, then, I yearned for the reform of poor humanity through the joyous amenities of punch. Had my grandmother up-stairs consumed punch instead of her embittering egg-flip! Had the ladies of Mercy, my future persecutors, drunk punch, the world might have proved a hilarious playground for me instead of a desperate school of adversity.