described. The reader will find an attempt at it in the story. The
parting from home and my adventures on the road are real.

Having reached Granard my courage began to fail, and my family at home,
now that I had departed from them, began also to feel something like
remorse for having permitted one so young and inexperienced as I then
was, to go abroad alone upon the world. My mother's sorrow, especially,
was deep, and her cry was, "Oh, why did I let my boy go? maybe I will
never see him again!"

At this time, as the reader may be aware from my parental education,
there was not a being alive more thoroughly imbued with superstition;
and, whether for good or ill, at all events that superstition returned
me to my family. On reaching Granard, I felt, of course, fatigued,
and soon went to bed, where I slept soundly. It was not, however, a
dreamless sleep: I thought I was going along a strange path to some
particular place, and that a mad bull met me on the road, and pursued
me with such speed and fury that I awoke in a state of singular terror.
That was sufficient; my mind had been already wavering, and the
dream determined me. The next morning after breakfast I bent my steps
homewards, and, as it happened, my return took a weighty load of bitter
grief from the heart of my mother and family. The house I stopped at
in Granard was a kind of small inn, kept by a man whose name was Peter
Grehan. Such were the incidents which gave rise to the tale of "The Poor
Scholar."

I was now growing up fast, and began to feel a boyish ambition of
associating with, those who were older and bigger than myself. Although
miserably deficient in education--for I had been well beaten but never
taught--yet I was looked upon as a prodigy of knowledge; and I can