I am afraid the vengeance was more than
proportioned to the offence!
Even during my illness that brave mother struggled to teach my
brothers' daily lessons, and my father heard them a short bit of
Latin grammar at his breakfast (five was thought in those days to be
the fit age to begin it, and fathers the fit teachers thereof). And
he continued to give this morning lesson when, on our return from
airing at Ramsgate after our recovery from the measles, my mother
found she must submit to transfer us to a daily governess.
Old Miss Newton's attainments could not have been great, for her
answers to my inquiries were decidedly funny, and prefaced sotto
voce with, 'What a child it is!' But she was a good kindly lady,
who had the faculty of teaching, and of forestalling rebellion; and
her little thin corkscrew curls, touched with gray, her pale eyes,
prim black silk apron, and sandalled shoes, rise before me full of
happy associations of tender kindness and patience. She was wise,
too, in her own simple way. When nurse would have forewarned her of
Clarence's failings in his own hearing, she cut the words short by
declaring that she should like never to find out which was the
naughty one. And when habit was too strong, and he had denied the
ink spot on the atlas, she persuasively wiled out a confession not
only to her but to mamma, who hailed the avowal as the beginning of
better things, and kissed instead of punishing.
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