f you don't believe me. Ha! shouldn't I like to see
his face, when you come upon him unawares, and call him 'Dad!' And I
tell you it is all as true, and as well proved as twice two. And if you
had not been really as great a baby as they took such pains to make
you, you would have put this and that together, and worked out your
little reckoning years ago. I did, for one, as soon as ever I put my
nose into the house. I sometimes tried to give you a hint; and just
because you took no notice, 'Aha!' thinks I, 'he knows all about it,
and makes believe not to; and of course he has his reasons.'

"Besides, one has only to look at you two together to say--that is the
block, and this the chip. The same long limbs, the same build--put you
in the same clothes, and look at you from behind, and not one man in
ten could say which was which. Of course, what is grown dark and grey
and grizzled in him, is carried out in pink and white and yellow with
you--the colouring must have been your mother's; and a deuced pretty
woman she was, the old porter says. He saw her once, not long before
she died; he had to take some money to her--on the sly, of course;
since then he has never been able to forget her, he says, and that his
master felt so spooney about her, he can't wonder at; far rather,
that he could give her up, and marry the wife he did--our charming
Mamsell's sister, you know; the two sisters were totally different in
everything--except the tin, which was the same. I rather think the
Meister must have had a try at the younger sister first, and been
rejected; she was a haughty 'Froelen' even then, you see; and so he
turned to the other sister, who was neither haughty nor handsome, and
so she took him. However, I suppose she wouldn't, if she had but known
of your own sweet self--you were just beginning to run about in your
first little boots--and had known that her precious husband used, as
often as he could get away, to go and have a peep at his former family
about three or four times a year, on his business journeys. It was all
kept so cosy, that not a soul ever heard of it. A sly fox your governor
was--excuse the candour of the remark. But sly he must have been in
this business, if you really did live so long without ever having smelt
a rat; and in other respects you are as quick a lad as may be. His
wife, however, somehow or other, in time did smell it, and hunted it
down, and there was the devil to pay and all, as you may fancy. She