did not recover its natural
tint for a long time, and the poor little heart was nearly broken at the
thought of the fresh disfigurement. The Boy felt that he had not only an
unusually long nose, but a nose that was crooked and would always be as
red as his hair.

He does not remember what was done to his uncle. But the uncle was for
half a century The Boy's best and most faithful of friends. And The Boy
forgave him long, long ago.

The Boy's first act of self-reliance and of conscious self-dependence
was a very happy moment in his young life; and it consisted in his being
able to step over the nursery fender, all alone, and to toast his own
shins thereby, without falling into the fire. His first realization of
"getting big" came to him about the same time, and with a mingled shock
of pain and pleasure, when he discovered that he could not walk under
the high kitchen-table without bumping his head. He tried it very often
before he learned to go around that article of furniture, on his way
from the clothes-rack, which was his tent when he camped out on rainy
days, to the sink, which was his oasis in the desert of the basement
floor. This kitchen was a favorite playground of The Boy, and about that
kitchen-table centre many of the happiest of his early reminiscences.
Ann Hughes, the cook, was very good to The Boy. She told him stories,
and taught him riddles, all about a certain "Miss Netticoat," who wore a
white petticoat, and who had a red nose, and about whom there still
lingers a queer, contradictory legend to the effect that "the longer she
stands the shorter she grows." The Boy always felt that, on account of
her nose, there was a peculiar bond of sympathy between little Miss
Netticoat and himself.

As he was all boy in his games, he would never cherish anything but a
boy-doll, generally a Highlander, in kilts and with a glengarry, that
came off! And although he became foreman of a juvenile hook-and-ladder
company before he was five, and would not play with girls at all, he had
one peculiar feminine weakness. His grand passion was washing and
ironing. And Ann Hughes used to let him do all the laundry-work
connected with the wash-rags and his own pocket-handkerchiefs, into
which, regularly, every Wednesday, he burned little brown holes with the
toy flat-iron, which _would_ get too hot. But Johnny Robertson and
Joe Stuart and the other boys, and even the uncles and the aunts, never
knew anything about that--unless