So from this time he was mute about my merits. I was the object of incessant disparagement and reproaches, and the feeling of this acted as a weighty clog on my efforts. The excellence which the Owenses, Pritchards, and Joneses of the school might aspire to was to be denied me. My spiritual, intellectual, and bodily functions were to be stimulated with birch, boot, and bluster; for in no other way could one so dense as I be affected. The pain at last became intolerable, and I was again drawing perilously near revolt. But Moses saw nothing, and continued to shower his wordy arrows, which perpetually stung and caused inward bleeding. I used to think that Moses was a grand scholar, but I got to believe that he had never been a boy. That towering intellect of his was not due to education, it came to him with his mother’s milk. Yet I was unable to understand, when I reflected on the severity of his manner, how the Lord Bishop of St. Asaph--who was a Prince of the Church, and was three times older than Moses--could unbend so far as to challenge us Workhouse boys to a race over his lawn, and would laugh and be as frisky as any of us. The stones of the highway would sooner rise and smile than Moses Owen would relax the kill-joy mask he wore at this period. At last, after a course of nine months’ tuition, I received permission to visit Ffynnon Beuno, and I was never recalled to Brynford. Though my aunt never forgot that she ought to be rid of me as soon as possible, there was no hardship in doing chores for her at the farm. When she was gracious, as she often was, she amply compensated me for any inward sufferings inflicted during her severe week-day mood. She was an exacting mistress, and an unsympathetic relative, though, in every other sense, she was a most estimable woman. But what I lacked most to make my youth complete in its joy was affection.