Too straitened in her means to keep a governess for me, and unwilling to send me to a school, my mother became my teacher herself; and, not having had any but the very commonest education, she was obliged to acquire in advance what she desired to impart. Many a night would she pore over the Latin Grammar, that she might be even one stage before me in the morning. Over and over did she get up the bit of geography that was to test my knowledge the next day; and in this way, while leading _me_ on, she acquired, almost without being aware of it, a considerable amount of information. Her faculties were above the common, and her zeal could not be surpassed; so that, while I was stumbling and blundering over “Swaine's Sentences,” she had read all Sallust's “Catiline,” and most of the “Odes” of Horace; and long before I had mastered my German declensions, she was reading “Grimm's Stories” and Auerbach's “Village Sketches.” Year after year went over quietly, uneventfully. I had long ceased to remember my former life of splendor, or, if it recurred to me, it came with no more of reality than the events of a dream. One day, indeed,--I shall never forget it,--the past revealed itself before me with the vivid distinctness of a picture, and, I shame to say, rendered me unhappy and discontented for several days after. I was returning one afternoon from a favorite haunt, where I used to spend hours,--the old churchyard of Killester, a long-unused cemetery, with a ruined church beside it,--when four spanking chestnuts came to the foot of the little rise on which the ruin stood, and the servants, jumping down, undid the bearing-reins, to breathe the cattle up the ascent. It was my father was on the box; and as he skilfully brushed the flies from his horses with his whip, gently soothing the hot-mettled creatures with his voice, I bethought me of the proud time when I sat beside him, and when he talked to me of the different tempers of each horse in the team, instilling into me that interest and that love for them, as thinking sentient creatures, which gives the horse a distinct character to all who have learned thus to think of him from childhood. He never looked at me as he passed. How should he recognize the little boy in the gray linen blouse he was wont to see in black velvet with silver buttons? Perhaps I was not sorry he did not know me. Perhaps I felt it easier to fight my own shame alone than if it had been confessed and witnessed. At all events, the sight sent me home sad and depressed, no longer able to take pleasure in my usual pursuits, and turning from my toys and books with actual aversion. Remembering how all mention of my father used to affect my mother long ago, seeing how painfully his mere name acted upon her, I forbore to speak of this incident, and buried it in my heart, to think and ruminate over when alone.