was curling. Beside it stood a couple of light carts, whilst two or
three lean horses or ponies were cropping the herbage which was
growing nigh. . . .

As a pendant to the landscape take a Flemish interior. The home of the
Borrows had been removed in the meantime, in accordance with the roving
traditions of the family, from Norman Cross to Edinburgh and from
Edinburgh to Clonmel.

And to the school I went [at Clonmel], where I read the Latin tongue
and the Greek letters with a nice old clergyman who sat behind a black
oaken desk with a huge Elzevir Flaccus before him, in a long gloomy
kind of hall with a broken stone floor, the roof festooned with
cobwebs, the walls considerably dilapidated and covered over with
stray figures in hieroglyphics evidently produced by the application
of a burnt stick.

In Ireland, too, he made the acquaintance of the gossoon Murtagh, who
taught him Irish in return for a pack of cards. In the course of his
wanderings with his father's regiment he develops into a well-grown and
well-favoured lad, a shrewd walker and a bold rider. "People may talk of
first love--it is a very agreeable event, I dare say--but give me the
flush, the triumph, and glorious sweat of a first ride." {5}

At Norwich he learns modern languages from an old _emigre_, a true
disciple of the _ancien cour_, who sets Boileau high above Dante; and
some misty German metaphysics from the Norwich philosopher, who
consistently seeks a solace in smoke from the troubles of life. His
father had already noted his tendency to fly off at a tangent which was
strikingly exhibited in the lawyer's office, where "within the womb of a