Comfort and joys for ever fled, He ne’er will warble more; Ah me! the sweetest youth is dead That e’er tuned reed before. The hand of misery laid him low, E’en hope forsook his brain; Relentless man contemned his woe, To him he sighed in vain. Oppressed with want, in wild despair he cried, ‘No more I’ll live!’ swallowed the draught, and died. Mr. Samuel Erin looked as if he had swallowed a draught; one of those recommended to persons suffering from the effects of poison. ‘Shade of Shakespeare!’ he cried, ‘do you call that a poem?’ William Henry murmured something in mitigation about its being an acrostic. The old gentleman’s sense of hearing was not acute, and led him to imagine he was being reproached for his surliness. He turned as red as a turkey-cock. Margaret also flushed to her forehead; she too had misunderstood what her cousin had said, and the more easily because the words she thought he had used (a cross stick) were so appropriate. But how could he, _could_ he, be so foolish as thus to give reins to his temper! Lastly, Frank Dennis became a brilliant scarlet. He was half suffocated with suppressed laughter. Still, true to his mission of peacemaker, he contrived to splutter out that when a poem was an acrostic, such perfection was not to be looked for as when the muse was unfettered. ‘Oh, that’s it, is it?’ said Mr. Erin grimly. ‘I’ve heard of young men wasting their time, and, what is worse, the time of their employers, in many ways; but that they should take to writing acrostics seems to me the _ne plus ultra_ of human folly. Bah! give me a dish of tea.’ CHAPTER IV. A REAL ENTHUSIAST. I AM afraid it is rather taken for granted by parents in general, as regards any behaviour they may adopt towards their offspring, that religion is always upon their own side. And yet there is a very noteworthy text about ‘provoking our children to wrath,’ which it is a mistake to ignore. Wise and reverend signors may well have learnt by experience to take trifling annoyances with equanimity; but the _amour propre_ of the young is a tender shoot, and very sensitive to rough handling. The most sensitive plant of all is the lad with a turn for literature; and, as a rule, parents have the least patience with him. When the turn is not a mere taste, but a natural gift, this does not much matter; no true flame was ever put out by the breath of contempt: but when it halts midway the youth has a bad time of it. He shivers at every sneer, without the means of giving it the lie. ‘Like a dart it strikes to his liver,’ because his armour, unlike that of true genius, is not arrow-proof. He knows that he is not the fool that his folk take him for, but he has an uneasy consciousness that they are partly right; that his powers are not equal to his pretensions. This was the case with William Henry Erin. [Illustration]