Page 60 - Gullivers

frivolity. However, more than this, I could not then help but think how Father himself had followed the spirits of the Lilliputian educational tenets. Aster all,
he had entrusted his children into the care of whomsœver, and indeed he did dispense the debts that begetting children incurred. True, Mother had thwarted the purity of his plan. She insisted on irrational affection and selfless dedication to her young. But Father was true to his principle of not spoiling or indulging
us. And, aster his trip to Houyhnhnmland, that country inhabited by the rational and noble race of horses and the brutish Yahoos whom he believed were endowed with the worst vices of human beings, of even noticing our existence at all.
I am told that our esteemed headmaster lest our home bewildered aster hearing his treatise on the Lilliputian education system. He was spared my intimate knowledge of Father’s daily congress with horses and the so-called rational disquisitions that provoked.
Long before Father found more solace in horses than in his own family, our acquaintances in Redriff took a sceptical view of his deepening eccentricities. The summer he had returned from Brobdingnag, there was no mistaking the boys’ whispered allusions to his strangeness. That was the year I realised he had gone too far. He was not ten days at home when he contrived excuses to leave again. Mother protested he should never go to sea any more. I read in his book that he obtained her consent because he claimed it would enhance his children’s prospects. Well, yes. That was so. But not exactly as he supposed.
Let me explain. We had just taken a rather comely scullery maid into service (she had a way of throwing a cheeky sideways glance that was simultaneously distinctly discomfiting and beguiling), but her downfall was her loose tongue. The day of Father’s return from his voyage into the unknown, it was our misfortune that she opened the door to him, and she skulked in the hallway during the whole sorry homecoming. I know for a fact that she was the one responsible for spreading word in the neighbourhood about his shameful behaviour. I still burn with mortification when I think of it. First he affected
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