Earlier in this chapter, in describing the house, there was mention made of a dairy, with nice dishes of scalded cream. One day my mother had occasion to leave the house for a while, and, on her return and on going into the dairy, she noticed there was a considerable amount of cream missing from one of the dishes, and that meant a line-up muster of my sister and myself to answer a stem question, and that question was put to my sister first.
“Seline, did you take the cream from. that dish of milk in the dairy?”
“No, mother.” “Tom, did you?” “No, mother.” Then with a lurch and a heave Tom could hold on to the cream no longer and I spewed the lie and the cream on the floor in front of where I stood. Oh! The reproach of that lie. Little boys and little girls, young men and young women, old men and old women, think not to escape your sins by a lie, for remember that for all these things God will bring you into judgement.
I was about five years of age when I first went to school. The school was a private one, there being no National Schools at that time in the district. The school consisted of one long and narrow Skillion room and the school mistress seemed to be built especially for such a place. She was very thin and frail looking with sharp, genteel features and although considerably past her teens she was still Miss S. and if ever there was a warm spring of ” love welling up within her, it seemed to have long since dried up, and she looked on her charges through a pair of spectacles with eyes as cole and piercing as icicles, and a countenance as cheerless as a frog in a bathroom., She must have known from the start that I disliked her, for she started early on me with the cane, and I do not remember going to school one single day that she did not practise that method of teaching me. If she had been a reader of character she would soon have learnt that good results were not to be gained by such methods. I disliked and disdained her and not a single lesson nor anything in connection with lessons do I remember having learnt during her reign as school mistress, yet I remember playing the wag one half day. I also remember quite a number of those children attending that school and have to this day some happy recollections of that period. In children there are chords of love – bang them with a cane and you create in that child a jarring dischord. Touched by a kind sympathetic hand those chords will vibrate and respond to love. There was a class of big girls who showed me s. lot of kindness at that school and I love and respect their memory today. There was a little firl near my own age who showed her interest and sympathy towards me, and my feelings responded in a passion of love towards her. Do I hear someone asking why I write such silly nonsence about school children’s love? Why not? To love is the most natural thing on earth and there is nothing higher in heaven or earth than love; for God is love.
