uncommon natural genius for many things, and soon topped in
accomplishments most of the persons around me. I had a quick ear and
a fine voice, which my mother cultivated to the best of her power,
and she taught me to step a minuet gravely and gracefully, and thus
laid the foundation of my future success in life. The common dances
I learned (as, perhaps, I ought not to confess) in the servants'
hall, which, you may be sure, was never without a piper, and where I
was considered unrivalled both at a hornpipe and a jig.

In the matter of book-learning, I had always an uncommon taste for
reading plays and novels, as the best part of a gentleman's polite
education, and never let a pedlar pass the village, if I had a
penny, without having a ballad or two from him. As for your dull
grammar, and Greek and Latin and stuff, I have always hated them
from my youth upwards, and said, very unmistakably, I would have
none of them.

This I proved pretty clearly at the age of thirteen, when my aunt
Biddy Brady's legacy of L100 came in to mamma, who thought to employ
the sum on my education, and sent me to Doctor Tobias Tickler's
famous academy at Ballywhacket--Backwhacket, as my uncle used to
call it. But six weeks after I had been consigned to his reverence,
I suddenly made my appearance again at Castle Brady, having walked
forty miles from the odious place, and left the Doctor in a state
near upon apoplexy. The fact was, that at taw, prison-bars, or
boxing, I was at the head of the school, but could not be brought to
excel in the classics; and after having been flogged seven times,
without its doing me the least good in my Latin, I refused to submit
altogether (finding it useless) to an eighth application of the rod.
'Try some other way, sir,' said I, when he was for horsing me once