Mary Ann possessed a single blemish in a nature fashioned to captivate a lonely and excitable child. She worshipped my uncle Lionel. My uncle Lionel was his mother's favourite--a Glasgow lad, my grandfather contemptuously defined him, without the Cameron nose; a fine, handsome, fair young fellow, the picture of my mother, extremely distinguished in manner and appearance, and reputed to be a genius. He is said to have written quantities of superlative verse which he disdained to publish; but as nobody ever saw even the manuscript, we may regard the achievement as apocryphal. He had finished his studies in Paris, which explained a terrifying habit, whenever he met me--frightening the wits out of me the while by his furious look--of bursting out into what I afterwards learnt to be an old French song: "Corbleu, madame, que faites vous ici?" I wish grown-up persons could realise the shudder of terror that ran through me and momentarily dimmed for me the light of day, when I heard that loud voice, encountered the mock ferocity of that blue glance, and then felt myself roughly captured by strong arms, lifted up, and a shaven chin drawn excruciatingly across my tender small visage. These are trifles to read of, but what is a trifle in childhood? A child feeds greedily upon its own excesses of sensation, thrives upon them, or is consumed by them. To these early terrors, these accumulated emotions, these swift alternations of anguish and rapture, which made opening existence for me a sort of swing, perpetually flying and dropping between tears and laughter, from radiant heights, without transition, to pitch darkness, do I attribute the nervous illnesses that have so remorselessly pursued me in after-years. The wonder is the mind itself did not give way. Big language for a handsome young man with a blonde moustache and an elegant figure to have provoked, with his Corbleu, madame! his theatrical fury, and his shaven chin. He now and then gave me a shilling to console me, which shilling I spontaneously offered to Mary Ann, whose real consolation it was, since it filled the steaming glass for her and my friend Dennis, the red-nosed coachman, and permitted me to sit in front of them, a grave and awed spectator of their aged frolics. Immoral undoubtedly, yet that evening bumper of punch converted Mary Ann into a charming companion. She and the fire in front of us--for it was on the verge of winter--cheered me as I had not yet been cheered since I had left my kind Kildare folk. The tyrants sat above in state, while I, enthralled below, listened to Mary Ann, as she wandered impartially from legend to reminiscence and anecdote, and not infrequently burst into song and dance.