I do not know whether the trousers had anything to do with it, but about the time that Jem and I were put into trousers we lived in a chronic state of behaving badly.  What makes me feel particularly ashamed in thinking of it is, that I know it was not that we came under the pressure of any overwhelming temptations to misbehave and yielded through weakness, but that, according to an expressive nursery formula, we were “seeing how naughty we could be.”  I think we were genuinely anxious to see this undesirable climax; in some measure as a matter of experiment, to which all boys are prone, and in which dangerous experiments, and experiments likely to be followed by explosion, are naturally preferred.  Partly, too, from an irresistible impulse to “raise a row,” and take one’s luck of the results.  This craving to disturb the calm current of events, and the good conduct and composure of one’s neighbours as a matter of diversion, must be incomprehensible by phlegmatic people, who never feel it, whilst some Irishmen, I fancy, never quite conquer it, perhaps because they never quite cease to be boys.  In any degree I do not for an instant excuse it, and in excess it must be simply intolerable by better-regulated minds.

But really, boys who are pickles should be put into jars with sound stoppers, like other pickles, and I wonder that mothers and cooks do not get pots like those that held the forty thieves, and do it.

I fancy it was because we happened to be in this rough, defiant, mischievous mood, just about the time that Mrs. Wood opened her school, that we did not particularly like our school-mistress.  If I had been fifteen years older, I should soon have got beyond the first impression created by her severe dress, close widow’s cap and straight grey hair, and have discovered that the outline of her face was absolutely beautiful, and I might possibly have detected, what most people failed to detect, that an odd unpleasing effect, caused by the contrast between her general style, and an occasional lightness and rapidity and grace of movement in her slender figure, came from the fact that she was much younger than she looked and affected to be.  The impression I did receive of her appearance I communicated to my mother in far from respectful pantomime.

“Well, love, and what do you think of Mrs. Wood?” said she.

“I think,” chanted I, in that high brassy pitch of voice which Jem and I had adopted for this bravado period of our existence—­“I think she’s like our old white hen that turned up its eyes and died of the pip.  Lack-a-daisy-dee!  Lack-a-daisy-dee!”

And I twisted my body about, and strolled up and down the room with a supposed travesty of Mrs. Wood’s movements.

“So she is,” said faithful Jem.  “Lack-a-daisy-dee!  Lack-a-daisy-dee!” and he wriggled about after me, and knocked over the Berlin wool-basket.

“Oh dear, oh dear!” said our poor mother.

Jem righted the basket, and I took a run and a flying leap over it, and having cleared it successfully, took another, and yet another, each one soothing my feelings to the extent by which it shocked my mother’s.  At the third bound, Jem, not to be behindhand, uttered a piercing yell from behind the sofa.