Our new life, having thus fairly commenced, went on for a long time with but little variation. Uncle Bryan allowed my mother to do exactly as she pleased, and she, without in the slightest way disturbing his regular habits, made the house very different from what it was when she first entered it. Every room in it, down to the basement, where she did the cooking, was always sweet and clean. We also had flowers on the sill of our bedroom window, and their graceful forms and bright colours were a refreshing relief to the dark back wall. It delights me to see the taste for _growing_ flowers cultivated by the poor. Flowers are purifiers; they breed good thoughts. Quite a rivalry was established between uncle Bryan and my mother in the care and attention which they bestowed on their respective window-sills. It went on silently and pleasantly, and my mother was not displeased because uncle Bryan was the victor. He trained some creepers from the window of his little back room to the window of our bedroom, and my mother watched them with intense interest creeping up, and up, until they reached the sill. 'They are like a message of love from your uncle, my dear,' she said. It is by such small precious links as these that heart is bound to heart. Yet the feelings with which uncle Bryan inspired me were by no means of a tender nature. He made no effort to win my affection; as a general rule, his bearing towards me was sufficiently cold to check tender impulse, and the words, 'I believe in nothing!' which I had heard him address sternly to my mother, had impressed me very seriously. I regarded him sometimes with fear and aversion. I was sent to a cheap school, a very few pence a week being paid for my education. My career in the school is scarcely worthy of record. All that was taught there were reading, writing, and arithmetic; and when these were learned our education was completed. The master never allowed himself to be tripped up by his pupils. Arithmetic was his strong point, and the rule-of-three was his boundary.