while the real operators are forgotten.  Thus, in time, with the powerful support of the matrons of Tregaron, who took the lead of their spouses, and directed the taste and opinions of the clod-hopping community, Catti’s school became an alarming rival to the curate’s.

Teachers, like all other scientific persons, must have their own systems; and as our heroine’s was very original, though perhaps not entirely peculiar to herself, with a view of communicating a benefit to others less enlightened, who follow her avocations, we shall treat the reader, once for all, with a solitary specimen of her method.

“Come here, little Gwenny Cadwgan,” said Catti one day, “Come here, my little pretty buttercup, and say your lesson, if you can, but if you can’t never mind, I won’t beat or scold you.”  Gwenny came forward, bobbed a curtsey, and, while her mistress broomed the mud from little Twm’s breeches, and combed his head on the back of the bellows, began her lesson.

Gwenny.—a, b, hab.

Catti.—There’s a good maaid!

Gwenny.—e, b, heb.

Catti.—There’s a good maaid!

Gwenny.—o, b, hob.

Catti.—There’s a good maaid!

Gwenny.—i, b,—I can’t tell.

Catti.—Skipe it, child, skipe it—(meaning “skip it.”)

Gwenny.—u, b, cub.

Catti.—There’s a good maaid!  Twm, you little wicked dog, don’t kick the child.  Go on, Gwenny vach.

Twm.—(who had been struggling for some time to get from under his mother’s combs,) I want to go a fishing.

Catti.—Lord love the darling child!  You’ll fall into the river and be drowned.

Twm.—Oh! no, mother; I always fish in the gutters.

Dio Bengoch.—I want to go home for some bread and butter.

“And I! and I! and I!” squalls every other urchin in the school; and out they would run in a drove, on perceiving the independent exit of master Twm, without waiting for the permission of his parent and governess.

CHAP. IV.

The bad effects of scholarship among servants.  The opinions of a fine lady on the subject.  A horse milliner.  Jack o Sîr Gâr, a very original character.  His manufacture and merchandize.  His tender interview with Catti.  A suspicion of her coquettings.

Perhaps our modern governesses who possess the vain accomplishment of reading and writing, may feel disposed to undervalue the acquirements of our rural Welsh governess.  But let them not triumph; and be it recollected that tastes differ, and that many of our living patricians, as well as wealthy plebians, who are considered the great, the mighty, and the respectable of the land, deprecate with becoming vehemence the prevailing mania for educating the poor.  We have heard ladies, and great ones too, attired in silks and velvets, pall and purple, and “that fared sumptuously every day,” declare most positively they never knew a servant good for anything, that could read and write.  No sooner were they capable of wielding a goose quill, than the impudent hussies presumed to have a will of their own, and in their opinions mounted a step nearer to the altitude of their mistresses.  And on men, they said, education had a worse effect, as thereby they became the idle readers of books, and newspapers, which made them saucy to their superiors, and sometimes the most villainous cut-throat radicals.  Now it will be readily admitted, we should think, that there was but little danger of Catti’s scholars ever becoming such pernicious characters; and therefore, let not illiberal envy withhold from her the well-merited meed of applause.  Alas for the good old days—we see no such schoolmistresses now-a-days! those days of the golden age of simplicity are gone for ever.  Days approved of by the great, and therefore good; when the humbler sons of industry looked up to them as gods, and they returned the compliment by looking down on their worshippers as good and well-taught dogs, that earned their bones and scraps.—Days when country squires handled a pitchfork better than a pen—when good boys learnt their catechism and read their bible against their will, and forgot it as soon as possible after leaving school.—Days when “simplicity and harmlessness” were the names that dignified boorish ignorance and passive stupidity—when a sycophantic subserviency paved the way to wealth and honors—when the gross vice of manly independence was unknown, and no class acknowledged among men, but the high and low, or the rich and poor.—Days that—(to finish this retrospective eulogy,) that, alas! are no more.

Although our hero’s mother could not be called a woman of letters, she certainly possessed qualities more original than generally fell to the lot of persons in her station.  At carding wool or spinning it, knitting stockings or mittins, the most envious admitted her superiority to every woman in Tregaron.  She moreover had gained no small consideration in another character, which her jealous neighbours satirically denominated a hedge milliner, whose province it was to make hedging gloves and coarse frocks for ploughmen, to darn the heels of their stout woollen stockings, and also to make and mend horses’ collars; the latter branch of her occupation, which required a delicate hand to cut the slender sewing thongs from the raw bull hides, caused her to be called a horse milliner, which after all, was not much more applicable than if she had been described as a bull tailor.  This malignant waggery, however, was unable to disturb the tranquil soul of Catti; she loved horses, and in her juvenile days had often whiled away her mornings and evenings in the rural pastimes driving of them, both in the plough and barrow, while carolling some rural ditty, till the rocks and mountains echoed with the cadence of her harmony.

It will not be a matter of much wonder that with all these accomplishments Catti should be importuned in the way of courtship, notwithstanding the injury her fame had suffered from the adventure with Sir John Wynne.  But the schoolmistress, elated with the success of her academy, turned a deaf ear to all the praises and protestations of the swains, until, as the village sages say, the right man came.  Like all her amiable sex, she professed the utmost abhorrence of mercenary motives in marriage, though many insinuated that she learnt the value of property from never having possessed any.  It was observed that she treated with indifference, if not aversion, those unprofitable lovers who had nothing but their goodly persons to recommend them.  Certain inuendoes were even thrown out respecting a suspicion of her coquettings with one of the most ugly, miserly, and repulsive of clowns;—one who was not only a clown, but a red-haired one;—not only red haired, but knock-kneed;—not only knock-kneed, but squint-eyed;—not only squint-eyed, but a woman-hater; and worse than all, a foreigner!—being a native of a distant part of the adjoining county of Carmarthen, and known only by the nick-name of Jack o Sîr Gâr, or Carmarthenshire Jack.  This amiable and interesting personage certainly possessed all those graces here enumerated, with many others, which were attached to peculiarities of character that rendered him so far like our great national hero Owen Glendower, that he “was not in the roll of common men.”  He was at this time the chief husbandman and bailiff at the squire’s, an office which, as he had others under his command, did not aid his personal