me, since books with a small quantity of type, and a good deal of
frightful illustration, beguiled many of my weary moments. You may
see my special favourites, bound up, on the shelf in my bedroom.
Crabbe's Tales, Frank, the Parent's Assistant, and later, Croker's
Tales from English History, Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, Tales of
a Grandfather, and the Rival Crusoes stand pre-eminent--also Mrs.
Leicester's School, with the ghost story cut out.

Fairies and ghosts were prohibited as unwholesome, and not unwisely.
The one would have been enervating to me, and the other would have
been a definite addition to Clarence's stock of horrors. Indeed,
one story had been cut out of Crabbe's Tales, and another out of an
Annual presented to Emily, but not before Griff had read the latter,
and the version he related to us probably lost nothing in the
telling; indeed, to this day I recollect the man, wont to slay the
harmless cricket on the hearth, and in a storm at sea pursued by a
gigantic cockroach and thrown overboard. The night after hearing
this choice legend Clarence was found crouching beside me in bed for
fear of the cockroach. I am afraid the vengeance was more than
proportioned to the offence!

Even during my illness that brave mother struggled to teach my
brothers' daily lessons, and my father heard them a short bit of
Latin grammar at his breakfast (five was thought in those days to be
the fit age to begin it, and fathers the fit teachers thereof). And
he continued to give this morning lesson when, on our return from
airing at Ramsgate after our recovery from the measles, my mother
found she must submit to transfer us to a daily governess.

Old Miss Newton's attainments could not have been great, for her