Among the boys was one from the County Limerick who saw the grotesque in everything, and my brother who was the leader in all the games and the handsomest and merriest boy in the school, who lived to be the success of the family and who had never known illness until he died when fifty six years of age. Fortune seemed to have showered on him every kind of good luck except that of growing old. Another boy was my dear friend, George Pollexfen, whose sister I afterwards married. Unlike my brother, George was the most melancholy of men. He was melancholy as a boy and as a man. I think it was his melancholy that attracted me, who am a cheerful & perennially hopeful man. It always mortifies me to think how cheerful I am, for I am convinced it is a gift which I share with all the villains: it is their unsinkable buoyancy that enables these unfortunates to go on from disaster to disaster and remain impenitent. My old friend and school-mate always saw the worst side of things. On a summer day he would remember that winter was coming, and if prosperity came to him, as it did all his life, he made elaborate preparations for the arrival of misfortune. He was very tender-hearted and humane, & so out of his prognostications of evil he would extract a kind of sad humour that made him infinitely tender and pitiful. Out of sorrow he would extract mirthfulness as the scaffold echoes with a jest. In the vehemence of good spirits and hopefulness we grow careless of other people's feelings, as do the rich of the poor men at their gates: not so my sad-hearted and much-burdened old friend. He had also great gifts of expression. What he felt and thought and what he smiled at, for he never laughed, he could tell you in long detailed narratives of men and things. Although slow and tedious in all his movements--and in conversation that tedium was delightful--he afterwards became famous as a steeplechase rider. He was exceedingly well made, and of proved nerve and courage. Sometimes both as boy and man he would throw off some of his melancholy and then his gaiety had the charm of the unexpected, like rare sunshine on a gloomy mountain. The head-master disliked him because of his irresponsiveness which is always trying to the autocratic temper. He said that he looked at him with the face of a horse, which indeed was not an inaccurate description. Had it been possible for our head-master to conceal himself for one night in the large dormitory, where George slept with nine or ten other boys, he would have been wiser. Night after night he would keep these boys wide awake & perfectly still while he told them stories, made impromptu as he went along. Silence was commanded in all the bedrooms, therefore these had to be told in smothered whispers. I did all I could--and my father helped me--to persuade him to come to Trinity College. Had he done so, he would doubtless have been a writer of extraordinary spontaneity & force, and I