Catherine, at the age of ten, was “noisy and wild, hated confinement and cleanliness, and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house.” When she was fourteen, we are told that she “preferred cricket, base-ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country, to books--or, at least, books of information--for, provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she had never any objection to books at all!” This, if not an accurate picture of the tastes of the children at Steventon, at least shows the sort of amusements which boys and girls brought up in a country parsonage had at their command. Perhaps it was of some such recollections that Jane Austen was thinking when she praised that common tie of childish remembrances. “An advantage this, a strengthener of love, in which even the conjugal tie is beneath the fraternal. Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power which no subsequent connection can supply, and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connection can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived. Too often, alas! it is so. Fraternal love, sometimes almost everything, is at others worse than nothing. But with William and Fanny Price it was still a sentiment in all its prime and freshness, wounded by no opposition of interest, cooled by no separate attachment, and feeling the influence of time and absence only in its increase.” That it was never Jane’s lot to feel this cooling of affection on the part of any member of her family is due not only to their appreciation of their sister, but to the serenity and adaptability of her own sweet disposition. CHAPTER II TWO MIDSHIPMEN Both Francis and Charles Austen were educated for their profession at the Royal Naval Academy, which was established in 1775 at Portsmouth, and was under the supreme direction of the Lords of the Admiralty. Boys were received there between the ages of 12 and 15. They were supposed to stay there for three years, but there was a system of sending them out to serve on ships as “Volunteers.” This was a valuable part of their training, as they were still under the direction of the College authorities, and had the double advantages of experience and of teaching. They did the work of seamen on board, but were allowed up on deck, and were specially under the eye of the captain, who was supposed to make them keep accurate journals, and draw the appearances of headlands and coasts. It is no doubt to this early training that we owe the careful private logs which Francis kept almost throughout his whole career.