As to his own performance, Clytie found that he memorised prose with great difficulty.  A week did she labour to teach him one brief passage from a lecture of Francis Murphy, depicting the fate of the drunkard.  She bribed him to fresh effort with every carnal lure the pantry afforded, but invariably he failed at a point where the soul of the toper was going “down—­down—­DOWN—­into the bottomless depths of HELL!” Here he became pitiful in his ineffectiveness, and Clytie had at last to admit that he would never be the elocutionist Allan was.  “But, my Land!” she would say, at each of his failures, “if you only could do it the way Mr. Murphy did—­and then he’d talk so plain and natural, too,—­just like he was associating with a body in their own parlour—­and so pathetic it made a body simply bawl.  My suz! how I did love to set and hear that man tell what a sot he’d been!”

However, Clytie happily discovered that the littler boy’s memory was more tenacious of rhyme, so she successfully taught him certain metrical conceits that had been her own to learn in girlhood, beginning with pithy couplets such as: 

  “Xerxes the Great did die
  And so must you and I.”

  “As runs the glass
  Man’s life must pass.”

  “Thy life to mend
  God’s book attend.”

From these it was a step entirely practicable to longer warnings, one of her favourites being: 

UNCERTAINTY OF LIFE

  “I in the burying-place may see
  Graves shorter there than I.
  From Death’s arrest no age is free,
  Young children, too, may die.

  “My God, may such an awful sight
  Awakening be to me;
  Oh, that by early grace, I might
  For death prepared be!”

She was not a little proud of Bernal the day he recited this to Grandfather Delcher without a break, though he began the second stanza somewhat timidly, because it sounded so much like swearing.

Nor did she neglect to teach both boys the lessons of Holy Writ.

Of a Sabbath afternoon she would read how God ordered the congregation to stone the son of Shelomith for blasphemy; or, perhaps, how David fetched the Ark of the Covenant from Kirjath-jearim on a new cart; and of how the Lord “made a breach” upon Uzza for wickedly putting his hand upon the Ark to save it when the oxen stumbled.  The little boys were much impressed by this when they discovered, after questioning, exactly what it meant to Uzza to have “a breach” made upon him.  The unwisdom of touching an Ark of the Covenant, under any circumstances, could not have been more clearly brought home to them.  They liked also to hear of the instruments played upon before the Lord by those that went ahead of the Ark; harps, psalteries, and timbrels; cornets, cymbals, and instruments made of fir-wood.