The Second Mister Read Online Free Page A

!) I know the difference between a pest and an anapaest and I can tell a gerund from a gerundive at forty paces, even in poor light. I have long been aware that Les Lettres Francaises was a distinguished literary journal, rather than essential items of equipment for any youngster going to spend a weekend at a holiday resort.
    Yes, there were scars too, many deep and long lasting.
    One sunny Sunday morning, when I was five or six, I was riding my tricyle on the footpath outside our house. My father told me not to bother going to mass on the reasonable basis we would probably not see such sunshine for years again. I obeyed without question, which was in itself most unusual. Unfortunately, some teacher or other had squeezed into my head the idea that not going to Sunday mass was a mortal sin and that if I died in a state thereof I would burn forever. I do believe that this is not the sort of thing that should be taught to small children as, to say the least, it tends to keep them awake at night and may not be helpful with their potty training. It was a very long time before I was eventually able to blurt out my first confession and thereby avoid the excessively documented and lengthy flames of Hell.
    Nobody said sorry.
    Then again, neither did I.
      
    Footnotes
* The Conditional Tense in Irish
*   The Dative Case
** A tense in Irish that denotes continual activity in the present.

D ULCE ET DECORUM EST....

M ENSA, MENSA...

W HEN YOUNG…

A UNT GETHSEMANE
    ( From THE BLACK SNOWMEN )
    A unt Gethsemane* was my mother’s sister and for three decades had taught Latin in a secondary school. She was made redundant at the age of fifty-three as a consequence of the surprising discovery by the educational authorities that a sound grounding in Cicero and Horace is not an essential prerequisite to a successful career as a petrol pump attendant or a social welfare recipient. She was given a small pension and devoted the rest of her life, and most of her paltry income, to the development of her garden. As time went by she became more and more detached from reality which was in strange contrast to the strict logic that she applied to anything related to horticulture.
    It was probably as a result of moderate myopia that she decided to abandon the usual arrangements of shape and colour that are the commonplace features of garden design, and to substitute for them a discipline that was unbending and that had its origin in the second great love of her life, the Latin language. She set about creating ‘ a grammatical garden’ . At the centre of the garden was a small lawn and this was almost completely surrounded by a deep border which was divided into five sections of equal size, one for each declension.
    As one looked out onto the garden from the front door of the house the area of the bed immediately to the left contained nothing but flowers, trees, and shrubs that were described by nouns of the first declension and this was followed in turn by an area containing those of the second declension only. This scheme was continued throughout so that the border terminated on the right with plants of the fifth declension.
    The area allotted to each declension was, in principle, subdivided into further sections for plants that were respectively the bearers of names that were either masculine, feminine or neuter. A slight complication arose in this regard, due to the fact that my aunt, in spite of her age, held feminist views that were remarkably advanced and she re fused absolutely to allow anything to grow in the garden whose botanical name was of the masculine gender. This had the rather odd result that the area allotted to the fourth declension, (whose nouns are mostly masculine), was only sparsely planted whereas in the area allocated to the fifth (whose nouns are almost exclusively feminine) a multiplicity of varieties competed for the available space. The plants were arranged alphabetically within the sections assigned to the feminine and