On the other hand, I was speedily as popular as a creature of legend--not by reason of my virtues, which, by a rare modesty, kept themselves concealed, but because of my high spirits, untamable once let loose; my imagination, which incessantly devised fresh shudders for these timid and unimaginative children; my prodigality in invention, and my general insubordination. The cowed and suffering baby of Ireland on Saxon shores at once revealed the Irish rebel, the instinctive enemy of law and order. I was commander-in-chief in revolt, with a most surprising gift of the gab; a satanic impulse to hurl my small weak self against authority on all occasions, and an abnormal capacity for flying out at every one with power to do me harm. Whatever may be said of the value of my courage, its quality even I the owner (who should be the last to recognise it!), must admit to be admirable. Alas! it was a virtue ever persistently wasted then as now. While it never procured me a single stroke of happiness or fortune, it has boundlessly added to the miseries of an imprudent career. The start in Lysterby ends my patient martyrdom. Here I became the active and abominable little fiend unkindness and ill-management made of one of the gentlest and most sensitive of natures. The farther I travelled the road of childhood the more settled became my conviction that grown-up humanity, which I gradually began to loath more than even I once had feared, was my general implacable enemy. I might have grown sly and slavish in this conviction; but I am glad to say that I took the opposite course. I may be said to have planted myself against a moral wall and furiously defied all the authorities of Church and State "to come on," hitting in blind recklessness out at every one, quite indifferent to blow and defeat. Little Angela of Kildare and Dublin, over whose sorrows I have invited the sympathetic reader to weep, was a pallid and pathetic figure. But Angela of Lysterby held her own--more even than her own, for she fought for others as well as for herself, and gave back (with a great deal more trouble at least) as much pain and affliction as she endured. Chapter XIV. THE WHITE LADY OF LYSTERBY. Do the ladies of Lysterby continue to train atrociously and mismanage children, to starve and thwart them, as they did in those far-off days, so remote that on looking back it seems to me now that somebody else and not I, a pacific and indifferent woman, content with most things round about me, lived those five years of perpetual passion and frantic unhappiness? Or has the old convent vanished, and carried off its long tale of incompetence, ignorance, cruel stupidity, and futile vexation?