s goaded to
reply that "home was getting too tame for me." And Jem, who always
backed me up, said, "And me too." For which piece of swagger we
forfeited our suppers; but when we went to bed we found pieces of cake
under our pillows, for my mother could not bear us to be short of food,
however badly we behaved.

I do not know whether the trousers had anything to do with it, but about
the time that Jem and I were put into trousers we lived in a chronic
state of behaving badly. What makes me feel particularly ashamed in
thinking of it is, that I know it was not that we came under the
pressure of any overwhelming temptations to misbehave and yielded
through weakness, but that, according to an expressive nursery formula,
we were "seeing how naughty we could be." I think we were genuinely
anxious to see this undesirable climax; in some measure as a matter of
experiment, to which all boys are prone, and in which dangerous
experiments, and experiments likely to be followed by explosion, are
naturally preferred. Partly, too, from an irresistible impulse to "raise
a row," and take one's luck of the results. This craving to disturb the
calm current of events, and the good conduct and composure of one's
neighbours as a matter of diversion, must be incomprehensible by
phlegmatic people, who never feel it, whilst some Irishmen, I fancy,
never quite conquer it, perhaps because they never quite cease to be
boys. In any degree I do not for an instant excuse it, and in excess it
must be simply intolerable by better-regulated minds.

But really, boys who are pickles should be put into jars with sound
stoppers, like other pickles, and I wonder that mothers and cooks do not
get pots like those that held the forty thieves, and do it.

I fancy it was because we happened to be in this rough, defiant,
mischievous mood, just about the time that Mrs. Wood opened her school,
that we did not particularly like our school-mistress. If I had been
fifteen years older, I should soon have got beyond the first impression
created by her severe dress, close widow's cap and straight grey hair,
and have discovered that the outline of her face was absolutely
beautiful, and I might possibly have detected, what most people failed
to detect, that an odd unpleasing effect, caused by the contrast between
her general style, and an occasional lightness and rapidity and grace of
movement in her slender figure, came from the fact that she was much
younger than she l