EARLY YEARS

Robert Hart began his romantic life in simple circumstances. He was
born on the 20th day of February, 1835, in a little white house
with green shutters on Dungannon Street, in the small Irish town of
Portadown, County Armagh, and was the eldest of twelve children. His
mother, a daughter of Mr. John Edgar, of Ballybreagh, must have been a
delightful woman, all tenderness and charity, judging from the way her
children's affections became entwined around her. His father, Henry
Hart, was a man of forceful and picturesque character, of a somewhat
antique strain, and a Wesleyan to the core. The household, therefore,
grew up under the bracing influence of uncompromising doctrines; it
was no unusual thing for one member to ask another at table, "What
have you been doing for God to-day?" and so rigidly was Sunday
observed that, had the family owned any Turners, I am sure they would
have been covered up on Saturday nights, just as they were in Ruskin's
home.

When the young Robert was only twelve months old the Harts moved to
Miltown, on the banks of beautiful Lough Neagh, remaining there barely
a year. Then they moved again--this time to Hillsborough, where he
attended his first school. It came about in this way. One afternoon
he was called into the parlour by his father. Two visitors--not by
any means an everyday occurrence in Miltown--were within. One was
a stoutish man with sandy hair, the other a very long person like a
knitting-needle. The stout man called the boy to him, passed his hand
carefully over the bumps of his head, and then, turning to the father,
said, "From what I gather of this child's talents from my examination
of his cranial cerebration, my brother's system of education is
exactly the one calculated to develop them," The men were two brothers
named Arnold, who proposed to open a little school in Hillsborough and
were tramping the country in search of pupils.

At the impressionable age of six or thereabouts an aunt fired the
boy's imagination with stories of the departed glories of the Hart
family. She used to tell him how their ancestor, Captain van Hardt,
came over from Holland with King William, fought at the Battle of
the Boyne and greatly distinguished himself; how afterwards, in
recognition of his gallant services, the King gave him the township of
Kilmoriarty as a reward; how the gallant captain settled himself down
there, kept his horses, ate well, drank deep, and left the place so