"

Sometimes, once or twice in a week, that lady visited the upper regions
in which the child lived. She came like a vivified picture, blandly
smiling in the most beautiful new clothes and little gloves and boots.
Wonderful scarfs, laces, and jewels glittered about her. She had always a
new bonnet on; and flowers bloomed perpetually in it, or else magnificent
curling ostrich feathers, soft and snowy as camellias. She nodded twice
or thrice patronisingly to the little boy, who looked up from his dinner
or from the pictures of soldiers he was painting. When she left the room,
an odour of rose, or some other magical fragrance, lingered about the
nursery. She was an unearthly being in his eyes, superior to his father,
to all the world, to be worshipped and admired at a distance. To drive
with that lady in a carriage was an awful rite. He sat in the back seat,
and did not dare to speak; he gazed with all his eyes at the beautifully
dressed princess opposite to him. Gentlemen on splendid prancing horses
came up, and smiled and talked with her. How her eyes beamed upon all of
them! Her hand used to quiver and wave gracefully as they passed. When he
went out with her he had his new red dress on. His old brown holland was
good enough when he stayed at home. Sometimes, when she was away, and
Dolly the maid was making his bed, he came into his mother's room. It was
as the abode of a fairy to him--a mystic chamber of splendour and
delight. There in the wardrobe hung those wonderful robes--pink and blue
and many-tinted. There was the jewel case, silver clasped; and a hundred
rings on the dressing table. There was a cheval glass, that miracle of
art, in which he could just see his own wondering head, and the
reflection of Dolly, plumping and patting the pillows of the bed. Poor
lonely little benighted boy! Mother is the name for God in the lips and
hearts of little children; and here was one who was worshipping a stone!

His father used to take him out of mornings, when they would go to the
stables together and to the park. Little Lord Southdown, the best natured
of men, who would make you a present of a hat from his head, and whose
main occupation in life was to buy nicknacks that he might give them away
afterwards, bought the little chap a pony, not much bigger than a large
rat, and on this little black Shetland pony young Rawdon's great father
would mount the boy, and walk by his side in the Park.

One Sunday morning as Rawdon Cr