good old Nursery Legends of
Dick Whittington, the Babes in the Wood, and so forth. My dreams
became less like the columns of a provincial newspaper. I imagined
myself another Marquis of Carabas, with Rubens in boots. I made a
desert island in the garden, which only lacked the geography-book
peculiarity of "water all round" it. I planted beans in the fond hope
that they would tower to the skies and take me with them. I became--in
fancy--Lord Mayor of London, and Mrs. Bundle shared my civic throne
and dignities, and we gave Rubens six beefeaters and a barge to wait
upon his pleasure.

Life, in short, was utterly changed for me. I grew strong, and stout,
and well, and happy. And I loved Nurse Bundle.

CHAPTER III

THE DARK LADY--TROUBLE IMPENDING--BEAUTIFUL, GOLDEN MAMMA

So two years passed away. Nurse Bundle was still with me. With her I
"did lessons" after a fashion. I learned to read, I had many of the
Psalms and a good deal of poetry--sacred and secular--by heart. In an
old-fashioned, but slow and thorough manner, I acquired the first
outlines of geography, arithmetic, etc., and what Mrs. Bundle taught
me I repeated to Rubens. But I don't think he ever learned the
"capital towns of Europe," though we studied them together under the
same oak tree.

We had a happy two years of it together under the Bundle dynasty, and
then trouble came.

I was never fond of demonstrative affection from strangers. The ladies
who lavish kisses and flattery upon one's youthful head after eating
papa's good dinner--keeping a sharp protective eye on their own silk
dresses, and perchance pricking one with a brooch or pushing a curl
into one eye with a kid-gloved finger--I held in unfeigned abhorrence.
But over and above my natural instinct against the unloving fondling
of drawing-room visitors, I had a special and peculiar antipathy to
Miss Eliza Burton.

At first, I think I rather admired her. Her rolling eyes, the black
hair plastered low upon her forehead,--the colour high, but never
changeable or delicate--the amplitude and rustle of her skirts, the
impressiveness of her manner, her very positive matureness, were just
what the crude taste of childhood is apt to be fascinated by. She was
the sister of my father's man of business; and she and her brother
were visiting at my home. She really looked well in the morning,
"toned down" by a fresh, summer muslin, and all womanly anxiety to
relieve my father of the trouble of mak