Category: Biographies
The picture is clear before me of the day I first walked. My mother, a handsome, cold-eyed woman, who did not love me, had driven out from town to nurse's cottage. I shut my eyes, and I am back in the little parlour with its spindle chairs, an old-fashioned piano with green si...
The picture is clear before me of the day I first walked. My mother, a handsome, cold-eyed woman, who did not love me, had driven out from town to nurse's cottage. I shut my eye...
2. Chapter II.Mary Jane was my first subject and my dearest friend. She lived in a little cottage at the top of the village that caught a tail-end view of the pond and the green from the back...
3. Chapter III.I must have been about five when my sovereignty was seriously threatened by the coming of Stevie. The ceremony of arrival I do not remember. He seems to have started into my lif...
4. Chapter IV.A little boy, a friend of my parents, was sent down to nurse's to gain strength by a first-hand acquaintance with cows' milk and the life of the fields. Louie was an exciting fr...
5. Chapter V.It would seem that happiness imprints itself more clearly and more permanently upon the mind than misery. Beyond a sense of enduring wretchedness, I can recall very little of my...
6. Chapter VI.The unhappiest little child that ever drew breath has immediate compensations between the dark hours undreamed of by elders. One of the persons that lent the relief of sparkle t...
7. Chapter VII.The flow of the day in my city home is lost for me. But pictures and portraits stand out, sometimes blurred, sometimes surprisingly distinct, upon a confused background. There w...
8. Chapter VIII.I do not know how long my martyrdom in the town house had endured before I resolved to make an end of it myself. Nor do I yet quite understand how the scene that led to an exces...
9. Chapter IX.Seven has been described as the age of reason. I am curious to know why, since many of us at fifty can hardly be said to have attained that rare and sublime period. John Stuart...
10. Chapter X.A grown-up young lady, with yellow ringlets, in a black-and-white silk dress, paid a visit to my grandmother one day, when I heard myself described as "bold and saucy,"--heaven...
11. Chapter XI.Was it six weeks or six months since I left that big town house, a disgraced and blighted little being? Time to a child is so unequal a matter. A month may seem a century, a yea...
12. Chapter XII.The next day I was too fully conscious of being the heroine of a sensational drama, to shed tears over my lonely and miserable self. The boat left the North Wall early in the mo...
13. Chapter XIII.A born traveller, the vagabond's instinct of forming pleasant friendships along the highroads that are buried with the last hand-shake showed itself on this my first voyage, and...
14. Chapter XIV.Do the ladies of Lysterby continue to train atrociously and mismanage children, to starve and thwart them, as they did in those far-off days, so remote that on looking back it s...
15. Chapter XV.What surprises me most when I recall those days is my own rapid development. The tiny inarticulate pensive creature of Ireland is, as if by magic, turned into a turbulent advent...
16. Chapter XVI.The sequel is enfolded in mystery. Was I long unconscious? Was I long ill? Was there any voice among the alarmed nuns lifted in my favour? Or was the secret kept among the super...
17. Chapter XVII.Nobody but a hungry and excitable child, exiled from home and happiness, bereft of toys and kisses, can conceive the mad delight of receiving a Christmas hamper at school. Pictu...
18. Chapter XVIII.The joy of my second year at Lysterby was Mr. Parker the dancing-master. Was he evoked from pantomime and grotesque legend by the sympathetic genius of Sister Ignatius? We were...
19. Chapter XIX.The succeeding years in Lysterby are obscured. Here and there I recall a vivid episode, an abiding impression. Papa came over with one of my elder sisters. They arrived at night...
20. Chapter XX.Home for the holidays! What a joyous sound the words have for little ears! Holidays--home! Two iridiscent words of rainbow-promise, expectation in all its warm witchery of dream...
21. Chapter XXI.The most vivid remembrance of my first return to Ireland is the sharp sensation of ugly sound conveyed in the flat Dublin drawl. I have never since been able to surmount this un...
22. Chapter XXII."Is childhood dead?" Lamb asks; "is there not in the best some of the child's heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments?" Can I now, without a responsive thrill, see m...
23. Chapter XXIII.My parents had taken a house at Dalkey, with a garden a dream of delights, that ran by shadowy slopes and bosky alleys down to the grey rocks where the sea seemed to become our...
24. Chapter XXIV.My eldest sister was only fourteen, but she was already, had ever been, a sage and a saint. At the age of eight she had put her hand into a blazing fire in order to die the deat...
25. Chapter XXV.All the children and young folk round about us had parents who, if they went into town of a morning, were safe to return at night. Most of them had mothers and aunts who lived a...
26. Chapter XXVI.All this hilarity does not imply the total absence of sadness in those bright days. I had lived and suffered too long in solitude not to have reserved a private corner for unutt...
27. Chapter XXVII.For the joy of our small kingdom a delightful Fenian dropped into our midst. It was breathed among us in fatal undertones that he had actually shot a man. He was a figure of rom...
28. Chapter XXVIII.This period of unwonted mildness in a turbulent career was seized by the good ladies of Lysterby as a fitting moment for my first communion. It might be only a temporary lull in...
29. Chapter XXIX.My mother came over again to Lysterby with Pauline and Birdie, who shared my last year in that quaint old town. My mother's second visit is a vague remembrance. I recall a singu...