The Account Of Our Schooling Days Under Mr. Trigg Was Given So Far
Back In This History That The Reader Will Have Little Recollection Of
It.
Mr. Trigg was in a small way a sort of Jekyll and Hyde, all
pleasantness in one of his
States and all black looks and truculence
in the other; so that out of doors and at table we children would say
to ourselves in astonishment, "Is this our schoolmaster?" but when in
school we would ask, "Is this Mr. Trigg?" But, as I have related, he
had been forbidden to inflict corporal punishment on us, and was
finally got rid of because in one of his demoniacal moods he thrashed
us brutally with his horsewhip. When this occurred we, to our regret,
were not permitted to go back to our aboriginal condition of young
barbarians: some restraint, some teaching was still imposed upon us by
our mother, who took, or rather tried to take, this additional burden
on herself. Accordingly, we had to meet with our lesson-books and
spend three or four hours every morning with her, or in the schoolroom
without her, for she was constantly being called away, and when
present a portion of the time was spent in a little talk which was not
concerned with our lessons. For we moved and breathed and had our
being in a strange moral atmosphere, where lawless acts were common
and evil and good were scarcely distinguishable, and all this made her
more anxious about our spiritual than our mental needs.
My two elder brothers did not attend, as they had long discovered that
their only safe plan was to be their own schoolmasters, and it was
even more than she could manage very well to keep the four smaller
ones to their tasks. She sympathized too much with our impatience at
confinement when sun and wind and the cries of wild birds called
insistently to us to come out and be alive and enjoy ourselves in our
own way.
At this stage a successor to Mr. Trigg, a real schoolmaster, was
unexpectedly found for us in the person of Father O'Keefe, an Irish
priest without a cure and with nothing to do. Some friends of my
father, on one of his periodical visits to Buenos Ayres, mentioned
this person to him-this priest who in his wanderings about the world
had drifted hither and was anxious to find some place to stay at out
on the plains while waiting for something to turn up. As he was
without means he said he would be glad of the position of schoolmaster
in the house for a time, that it would exactly suit him.
Father O'Keefe, who now appeared on the scene, was very unlike Mr.
Trigg; he was a very big man in black but rusty clerical garments. He
also had an extraordinarily big head and face, all of a dull, reddish
colour, usually covered with a three or four days' growth of grizzly
hair.
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