Mary Lynch." One house which Beth had to pass on her way to school
made a strong impression on her imagination. It was a gloomy abode
with a broad doorstep and deep portico, broken windows, and a
mud-splashed door, from beneath which she always expected to see a
slender stream of blood slowly trickling. For a man called Macgregor
had murdered his wife there--beaten her brains out with a poker. Beth
never heard the name Macgregor in after life without a shiver of
dislike. Much of her time at school was spent in solitary confinement
for breaches of the peace. With a face as impassive as a monkey's she
would do the most mischievous things, and was always experimenting in
naughty tricks, as on one occasion when Miss Deeble left the
schoolroom for a minute, but had to come hurrying back, recalled by
wild shrieks; and found that Beth had managed in that minute to tip up
a form with four children on it, throw their books out of the window,
and sprinkle ink all over the floor. Miss Deeble marched her
downstairs to an empty kitchen, and left her sitting on a stool in the
middle of it with an A B C in her hand. But Beth took no interest in
the alphabet in those days, and hunted black-beetles with the bellows
instead of learning it. The hearthstone was the place of execution.
When she found a beetle, she would blow him along to it with the
bellows, and there despatch him. She had no horror of any creature in
her childhood, but as she matured, her whole temperament changed in
this respect, and when she met a beetle on the stairs she would turn
and fly rather than pass it, and she would feel nauseated, and shiver
with disgust for hours after if she thought of it. She knew the exact
moment that this horror came upon her; it happened when she was ten
years old. She found a beetle one day lying on its back, and thinking
it was dead, she took it up, and was swinging it by its antennae when
the creature suddenly wriggled itself round, and twined its prickly
legs about her finger, giving her a start from which she never
recovered.

Beth probably got as far as A B ab, while she was at Miss Deeble's;
but if she were backward with her book, her other faculties began to
be acute. It was down in that empty kitchen that she first felt the
enchantment of music. Some one suddenly played the piano overhead and
Beth listened spell-bound. Again and again the player played, and
always the same thing, practising it. Beth knew every note. Long
afterwa