h groom went away I had asked if my new steed "could jump." I
questioned my father's men as to the earliest age at which young
gentlemen had ever been allowed to go out hunting, within their
knowledge. I went to bed to dream of rides as wild as Mazeppa's, of
hairbreadth escapes, and of feats of horsemanship that would have
amazed Mr. Astley. And hopes and schemes so wild that I dared not
bring them to the test of my father's ridicule, I poured with pride
into Nurse Bundle's sympathetic ear.

Dear, good, kind Nurse Bundle! She was indeed a mother to me, and a
mother's anxieties and disappointments were her portion. The effect of
her watchful constant care of my early years for me, was whatever good
there was about me in health or manners. The effect of it for her was,
I believe, that she was never thoroughly happy when I was out of her
sight. In these circumstances, it seemed hard that when most of my
infantile diseases were over, when I was just becoming very
intelligent (the best company possible, Mrs. Bundle declared), when I
wore my clothes out reasonably, and had exchanged the cries which
exercise one's lungs in infancy for rational conversation by the
nursery fireside, I should be drawn away from nurse and nursery almost
entirely. It was right and natural, but it was hard. Nurse Bundle felt
it so, but she never complained. When she felt it most, she only said,
"It's all just as it should be." And so it was. Boys and ducklings
must wander off some time, be mothers and hens never so kind! The
world is wide, and duck-ponds are deep. The young ones must go alone,
and those who tremble most for their safety cannot follow to take care
of them.

I really shrink from realizing to myself what Nurse Bundle must have
suffered whilst I was learning to ride. The novel exercise, the
stimulus of risk, that "put new life into me," were to her so many
daily grounds for the sad probability of my death.

"Every blessed afternoon do I look to see him brought home on a
shutter, with his precious neck broken, poor lamb!" she exclaimed one
afternoon, overpowered by the sight of me climbing on to the pony's
back, which performance I had brought her downstairs to witness, and
endeavoured to render more entertaining and creditable by secretly
stimulating the pony to restlessness, and then hopping after him with
one foot in the stirrup, in what I fancied to be a very knowing
manner.

"Why, my dear Mrs. Bundle," said my father, smiling,