seem
so very much afterwards--as the boy said of the tooth when he looked at
it in the dentist's forceps--but the wrench is really bad.

I learned my letters from my mother, and picked up a few other
smatterings before I had daily lessons from a tutor at Dingle. Strange
to say, a very good classical education could have been obtained there
in the thirties, better, so far as I can estimate, than could have been
expected from a town double the size at the same period in England.

At the age of ten I was sent to Huddard's, then a very sound school in
Dublin. I was well enough taught, not caned enough for my deserts,
though more than sufficed for my feelings, and sufficiently fed, but at
the end of two years I had to leave owing to ill health.

An apothecary, who selfishly recollected that the more medicines I took
the better for him if not for me, converted me into a human receptacle
for his empirical abominations, but another surgeon, who was rather
tardily called in, packed me off to the country.

One of the leading Dublin physicians certified that I had only one lung;
but as the other has served me faithfully for sixty-nine years, I am
rather sceptical as to the accuracy of his diagnosis.

I remember very little about Huddard's, except that it was in Mountjoy
Square, and about a hundred boys were herded there in unsought
proximity. We boarders always fought the town boys, but also had to
cajole them in humiliating ways to smuggle us in contraband articles of
food. The meals at Huddard's were fairly good, no doubt, as school fare
goes, but the sugary stick-jaw stuff for which the soul of a boy longs
was naturally not part of the official bill of fare. The bullying was of
a reasonable nature, or at all events I could hold my own with the best
of them, being indifferent to punishment so long as I could hit out
effectively from the shoulder. One of the ushers, a dwarf of malignant
disposition, was an awful tyrant, and we always had an ardent desire to
tar and feather him, only we did not know how to set about the operation
even if we had ventured to attempt it.

After a happy interval of convalescence at home, I was sent to a smaller
school kept by Mr. Hogg at Limerick. One of the boys there subsequently
became that illustrious ornament of the Bench, Lord Justice Barry.

He was a very eloquent man, counted so even at the Irish Bar, where a
certain high-flown loquacity is pretty prevalent, and had a great
repute. He a