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 clodhopping community, Catty’s school became an alarming rival to the curate’s.

The mode of tuition adopted by Twm’s mother, was an entirely original one, as the reader will have surmised.  It cost very little trouble in acquiring, because its chief secret consisted in tutor and pupils doing just what they chose.  It may save a good deal of anxiety and trouble to those tutors who are too conscientious if we furnish them with a leaf from the book of this original preceptor.

“Come here, little Guenny Cadwgan,” said Catty 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 nor scold you.”  Guenny came forward bobbing a curtsey, and while his mistress broomed the mud from little Twm’s breeches, began her lesson.

Guenny.—a, b, hab.

Catty.—There’s a good maaid!

Guenny.—e, b, heb.

Catty.—There’s a good maaid!

Guenny.—o, b, hob.

Catty.—There’s a good maaid!

Guenny.—i, b,—can’t tell.

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

Guenny.—u, b, cub.

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

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

Catty.—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 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.

CHAPTER IV.

A lecture on learning.  Astuteness below stairs.  A gentleman’s opinion on servants.  A horse milliner.  Intimacy with Catty.  More suspicion of “delicate attentions,” which so far are not quite so criminal as the squire’s.

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 plebeians, 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 “faring sumptuously every day,” declare most positively that 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 their opinions mounted a step nearer to the attitude 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 villanous cut-throat radicals.  Now it will be readily admitted, we should think, that there was little danger of Catty’s scholars ever becoming such pernicious characters; and therefore, let not liberal envy withhold from her the well-merited meed of applause.  Alas for the good old times—we see no such school-mistresses now-a-days! those days of the golden age of simplicity are gone for ever.

Perhaps we might wonder that the parents of the children, those who paid such a round sum every week for instruction administered to those “babes and sucklings,” did not grumble at the slow pace at which the process went on.  But to criticise a subject properly, we must be “well up” in it, and the villagers of Tregaron were not exactly calculated to measure the amount of “book larning” their babes did, or did not acquire.  They were satisfied if their children were “out of the way, the livelong day” and a penny per week was surely not so high a price to pay for that luxury.

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 mittens, 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 mend hedging gloves and coarse frocks for ploughmen, to darn or patch with leather the heels of their stout woollen stockings, and also to repair horse collars at half the price charged by old Daff the saddler; the latter part 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 called a bull tailor.  This malignant waggery, however, was unable to disturb the tranquil soul of Catty; she loved horses, and in her juvenile days had often whiled away her mornings and evenings in the rural pastime of driving them, both in plough and harrow, while carolling some rural ditty, till the rocks and mountains echoed with the cadence of her harmony.

Catty, with such capabilities and accomplishments, was of course an object of wonder, awe, and admiration, to many of the swains of Tregaron, notwithstanding those “delicate attentions” bestowed upon her by Sir Jno. Wynn, bart., but the success of her original method of tuition made her quite independent of their protestations.  But, altering the sex in the quotation, we may say that, “There is a tide in the affairs of women;” and it proved to be so in Catty’s case.

The right man came at last.  Like all her amiable sex, she professed the utmost abhorrence of mercenary motives in marriage, though many insinuated that she knew the value of property from having never possessed any worth mentioning.  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 innuendoes 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 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 of Sheer Gâr, or Carmarthenshire Jack.

This person was repulsive in the extreme.  Clad in old, patched, dirty clothes, with such peculiar facial properties as we have before enumerated, he was apparently the last man upon whom one of the opposite sex would have cast her favouring eye.  He was at this time chief husbandman and bailiff to the squire, an office which, giving him power over other servants, we may be very sure did not increase his popularity.  But few showed their distaste and aversion openly; it would have been a dangerous experiment with Jack of Sheer Gâr.

The standing jest against him was, his qualifications as a trencherman, and his reputation as a