stupid-looking when they went into society. It was awful, she thought, to
see young fellows and big lumps of girls like the Bradys stalk into a
ballroom and sit the whole night long in a corner, without attempting to
get up. She did n't know how mothers COULD bring children up so
ignorantly, and did n't wonder at some of them not being able to find
husbands for their daughters.

But we had a lot to feel thankful for. Besides a sympathetic mother,
every other facility was afforded us to become accomplished. Abundance of
freedom; enthusiastic sisters; and no matter how things were going--whether
the corn would n't come up, or the wheat had failed, or the pumpkins had
given out, or the water-hole run dry--we always had a concertina in the
house. It never failed to attract company. Paddy Maloney and the
well-sinkers, after belting and blasting all day long, used to drop in at
night, and throw the table outside, and take the girls up, and prance
about the floor with them till all hours.

Nearly every week Mother gave a ball. It might have been every night only
for Dad. He said the jumping about destroyed the ground-floor--wore it
away and made the room like a well. And whenever it rained hard and the
water rushed in he had to bail it out. Dad always looked on the dark side
of things. He had no ear for music either. His want of appreciation of
melody often made the home miserable when it might have been the merriest
on earth. Sometimes it happened that he had to throw down the plough-reins
for half-an-hour or so to run round the wheat-paddock after a horse or an
old cow; then, if he found Dave, or Sal, or any of us, sitting inside
playing the concertina when he came to get a drink, he would nearly go mad.

"Can't y' find anything better t' do than everlastingly playing at that
damn thing?" he would shout. And if we did n't put the instrument down