’Tis sweet to stroll on Cambrian heights, O’erlooking vales and rivers, Where bird-song sweet, with breeze unites, Each, sunshine rapture givers! To crown their gust the light repast— So cool—can never come awry, Oh sweet! to break the mid-day fast On sweet new milk and flummery. CHAP. V. An essay on courting in bed. Our hero removed to the curate’s school. THE scene so lightly touched upon in the last chapter, between our schoolmistress and her beau, called forth the mischievous talents of little Twm Shôn Catti, who, while they sat side by side at the goodly oak table, fastened them together by the coat and gown with a peeled thorn spike, which, before the introduction of pins, was used by the fair sex to join together their various articles of attire. When his mother rose suddenly to help her spoon-merchant with more spoon meat, she rather surprized him by carrying away, with his heart, the greater part of the tattered skirt of his old coat, so that Jack might have said, with Tag the author, “The lovely maid on whom I doat, Has made a spencer of my coat.” The wicked urchin who caused this unsanctioned union, set up a loud laugh, and Catti’s grumpy sister Juggy, for the first time in her life, astonished them with a grin on the occasion. Twm received a severe rebuke from his parent, and the hapless Jack, with the view of propitiating an evil spirit that might prove troublesome to him hereafter, made him a present of a new spoon, which, because it was merely a common one, he ungratefully threw into the blazing turf fire, which glowed on the hearth in a higher pile and wider dimensions than usual, and demanded one of his best box-wood ware. Jack would have given it to him immediately, but for the intervention of his mother, who forbade the indulgence. No sooner, however, was he gone than Twm watched his opportunity and purloined as many of the better sort as he could conveniently take away unperceived, and sold them at the cheap rate of stolen goods, to an old woman named, or rather nick-named, Rachel Ketch, from some supposed resemblance in her character to that of the finisher of the law, so surnamed, although some persons roundly asserted that she was in fact a relict one of those celebrated law officers, one John Ketch esquire, of Stretch-neck Place, Sessions Court, Carmarthen. As no further consequence followed this act of unprovoked delinquency, it was scarcely worth mentioning, except that it stands as the first of the kind on record; and when discovered, Twm’s over affectionate mother did not punish him for it,—an omission much censured by rigid people, who construed this petty act into the slight root from which sprung the huge tree of his after enormities; “But maudlin mothers, all, have tender hearts, Too kind to root an early shoot of vice By wholesome chastisement. The little darlings! Who could punish them, whate’er their faults?”