_Catti_.—Skipe it, child, skipe it—(meaning “skip it.”) _Gwenny_.—u, b, cub. _Catti_.—There’s a good maaid! Twm, you little wicked dog, don’t kick the child. Go on, Gwenny vach. _Twm_.—(who had been struggling for some time to get from under his mother’s combs,) I want to go a fishing. _Catti_.—Lord love the darling child! You’ll fall into the river and be drowned. _Twm_.—Oh! no, mother; I always fish in the gutters. _Dio Bengoch_.—I want to go home for some bread and butter. “And I! and I! and I!” squalls every other urchin in the school; and out they would run in a drove, on perceiving the independent exit of master Twm, without waiting for the permission of his parent and governess. CHAP. IV. The bad effects of scholarship among servants. The opinions of a fine lady on the subject. A horse milliner. Jack o Sîr Gâr, a very original character. His manufacture and merchandize. His tender interview with Catti. A suspicion of her coquettings. PERHAPS our modern governesses who possess the vain accomplishment of reading and writing, may feel disposed to undervalue the acquirements of our rural Welsh governess. But let them not triumph; and be it recollected that tastes differ, and that many of our living patricians, as well as wealthy plebians, who are considered the great, the mighty, and the respectable of the land, deprecate with becoming vehemence the prevailing mania for educating the poor. We have heard ladies, and great ones too, attired in silks and velvets, pall and purple, and “that fared sumptuously every day,” declare most positively they never knew a servant good for anything, that could read and write. No sooner were they capable of wielding a goose quill, than the impudent hussies presumed to have a will of their own, and in their opinions mounted a step nearer to the altitude of their mistresses. And on men, they said, education had a worse effect, as thereby they became the idle readers of books, and newspapers, which made them saucy to their superiors, and sometimes the most villainous cut-throat radicals. Now it will be readily admitted, we should think, that there was but little danger of Catti’s scholars ever becoming such pernicious characters; and therefore, let not illiberal envy withhold from her the well-merited meed of applause. Alas for the good old days—we see no such schoolmistresses now-a-days! those days of the golden age of simplicity are gone for ever. Days approved of by the great, and therefore good; when the humbler sons of industry looked up to them as gods, and they returned the compliment by looking down on their worshippers as good and well-taught dogs, that earned their bones and scraps.—Days when country squires handled a pitchfork better than a pen—when good boys learnt their catechism and read their bible against their will, and forgot it as soon as possible after leaving school.—Days when “simplicity and harmlessness” were the names that dignified boorish