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. Although his large face was unmistakably, intensely Irish, it was not the gorilla-like countenance so common in the Irish peasant- priest - the priest one sees every day in the streets of Dublin.

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