Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: and escaped the Spartan regime of cocoa and porridge (" stirabout," we called it) for breakfast by appearing on the scene when the need for economy was less pressing and a more varied diet at all meals was permitted in the nursery and schoolroom. I had been a wretchedly delicate baby, and my beloved nurse, Betsy, often told me later that she feared she would never rear me. " Let her die, Miss Robinson, let her die. You'll never ' rare' that one," Thomas Halsey, porter of Trinity College, Dublin, would say when Betsy passed his gateway with me in her arms. But Betsy insisted upon keeping me alive, though I lay " on a weeshy little down pillow " for the first three months of my life and " a body 'd be almost afeared " to touch me. CHAPTER II THE UPPER CASTLE YARD My father, a Fellow of Trinity College, had become Dean of the Chapel Royal in 1860, and we lived in the Upper Castle Yard opposite the viceregal quarters. The first tune I remember was the " Salute " which announced the entrance or exit of the Lord Lieutenant, and my first love was Armine Wodehouse, the then Lord Lieutenant's (Lord Kimberley's) younger son. When I acquired a very pretty hat, the crown of which consisted of a poor spatch-cocked kingfisher, I was nothappy till I had paraded it for Armine's approval, and I think of him still, though it is many years since his death and many more since I saw him, as a neatly- made little boy of five years old in a black velveteen suit and black silk stockings, just as he looked to me when I sat on his father's knee wearing my blue- winged hat in the drawing-room at Dublin Castle— fifty-one years ago I I used to have toothache very badly when I was small—perhaps it was due to the inevitable cutting of double teeth—and it would sometimes wake me up crying in the nigh...