She said it was good to be there then, and think of home and the fireside; and better still, when home was reached at last, to think of the desolate pond we had left; and good, indeed, it was to trudge home by wood and park and avenue at dusk, when the bats were about, with Alfred and Charlie and Mimsey and Madge and Medor; swishing our way through the lush, dead leaves, scattering the beautiful, ripe horse-chestnut out of its split creamy case, or picking up acorns and beechnuts here and there as we went. And, once home, it was good, very good, to think how dark and lonesome and shivery it must be out there by the _mare_, as we squatted and chatted and roasted chestnuts by the wood fire in the school-room before the candles were lit--_entre chien et loup_, as was called the French gloaming--while Therese was laying the tea-things, and telling us the news, and cutting bread and butter; and my mother played the harp in the drawing-room above; till the last red streak died out of the wet west behind the swaying tree-tops, and the curtains were drawn, and there was light, and the appetites were let loose. I love to sit here, in my solitude and captivity, and recall every incident of that sweet epoch--to ache with the pangs of happy remembrance; than which, for the likes of me, great poets tell us there is no greater grief. This sorrow's crown of sorrow is my joy and my consolation, and ever has been; and I would not exchange it for youth, health, wealth, honor, and freedom; only for thrice happy childhood itself once more, over and over again, would I give up its thrice happy recollections. That it should not be all beer and skittles with us, and therefore apt to pall, my cousins and I had to work pretty hard. In the first place, my dear mother did all she could to make me an infant prodigy of learning. She tried to teach me Italian, which she spoke as fluently as English or French (for she had lived much in Italy), and I had to translate the "Gierusalemme Liberata" into both those latter languages--a task which has remained unfinished--and to render the "Allegro" and the "Penseroso" into Miltonian French prose, and "Le Cid" into Corneillian English. Then there were Pinnock's histories of Greece and Rome to master, and, of course, the Bible; and, every Sunday, the Collect, the Gospel, and the Epistle to get by heart. No, it was not all beer and skittles. It was her pleasure to teach, but, alas! not mine to learn; and we cost each other many a sigh, but loved each other all the more, perhaps. Then we went in the mornings, my cousins and I, to M. Saindou's, opposite, that we might learn French grammar and French-Latin and French-Greek. But on three afternoons out of the weekly six Mr. Slade, a Cambridge sizar stranded in Paris, came to anglicize (and neutralize) the Latin and Greek we had learned in the morning, and to show us what sorry stuff the French had made of them and of their quantities.