My education was in consequence somewhat desultory. The persuasions of Father Francis, indeed, often won me for a time to study, and the wishes of my mother, whose word was ever law to her son, made me perhaps attend to the instructions of the good old priest more than my natural volatility would have otherwise admitted. At times, too, the mad spirit of laughing and jesting at everything, which possessed me from my earliest youth, would suddenly and unaccountably be changed into the most profound pensiveness, and reading would become a delight and a relief. I thus acquired a certain knowledge of Latin and of Greek, the first principles of mathematics, and a great many of those absurd and antiquated theories which were taught in that day under the name of philosophy. But from Father Francis, also, I learned what should always form one principal branch of a child's education--a very tolerable knowledge of my native language, which I need not say is, in general, spoken in Bearn in the most corrupt and barbarous manner. Thus, very irregularly, proceeded the course of my mental instruction; my corporeal education my father took upon himself, and as his laziness was of the mind rather than the body, he taught me thoroughly, from my very infancy, all those exercises which, according to his conception, were necessary to make a perfect cavalier. I could ride, I could shoot, I could fence, I could wrestle, before I was twelve years old; and of course the very nature of these lessons tended to harden and confirm a frame originally strong, and a constitution little susceptible of disease. The buoyancy of youth, the springy vigour of my muscles, and a good deal of imaginative feeling, gave me a sort of indescribable passion for adventure from my childhood, which required even the stimulus of danger to satisfy. Had I lived in the olden time, I had certainly been a knight errant. Everything that was wild, and strange, and even fearful, was to me delight; and it needed many a hard morsel from the rough hand of the world to quell such a spirit's appetite for excitement. To climb the highest pinnacles of the rocks, to plunge into the deepest caverns, to stand on the very brink of the precipices and look down into the dizzy void below, to hang above the cataract on some tottering stone, and gaze upon the frantic fury of the river boiling in the pools beneath, till my eye was wearied, and my ear deafened with the flashing whiteness of the stream, and the thundering roar of its fall--these were the enjoyments of my youth, and many, I am afraid, were the anxious pangs which my temerity inflicted on the bosom of my mother. I will pass over all the little accidents and misadventure of youth; but on one circumstance, which occurred when I was about twelve years old, I must dwell more particularly, inasmuch as it was not only of import at the time, but also affected all my future life by its consequences.