Was awakened by a great multitude of and variety of wren-boys shouting their lilts at top pitch all over the neighbourhood. It is good to see, at any rate, that the old custom is not dying out, and we always support it by distributing pennies to the urchins. Wanted to practise, but Mám wouldn’t let me. Cleared Colonials and read an interesting book, Scott’s, Macauley’s and Thackeray’s Lives of Goldsmith, with some of the latter’s works appended. – I am enjoying it immensely, especially such classics as Johnson and a welter of literature and Goldsmith comparing himself to a fat man in a famine who, when his contemporaries proposed feasting on the superfluous parts of his body, resisted with some justice on having the first shie himself. – Went to Arthur, where was Miss O’Grady, a golfy cardy sort of person, governess to a rich heiress. Had fun but not of a classical style. Fr. Pat was there in great spirits when I came home.
