_Nursery Rhyme_.


When the school was opened, Jem and I were sent there at once. Everybody
said it was "time we were sent somewhere," and that "we were getting too
wild for home."

I got so tired of hearing this at last, that one day I was 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