most objectionable of domestic jokes, the parody of love
affairs in connection with children. Miss Burton called me her little
sweetheart, and sent me messages, and vowed that I was quite a little
man of the world, and then was sure that I was a desperate flirt. The
lank lawyer wagged my hand of a morning, and said, "And how is
Miss Eliza's little beau?" And I laughed, and looked important,
and talked rather louder, and escaped as often as I could from the
nursery, and endeavoured to act up to the character assigned me with
about as much grace as AEsop's donkey trying to dance. I must have
become a perfect nuisance to any sensible person at this period, and
indeed my father had an interview with Nurse Bundle on the subject.

"Master Reginald seems to me to be more troublesome than he used to
be, nurse," said my father.

"Indeed you say true, sir," said Mrs. Bundle, only too glad to reply;
"but it's the drawing-room and not the nursery as does it. Miss Burton
is always a begging for him to be allowed to stay up at nights and to
lunch in the dining-room, and to come down of a morning, and to have a
half-holiday in an afternoon; and, saving your better knowledge, sir,
it's a bad thing to break into the regular ways of children. It ain't
for their happiness, nor for any one else's."

"You are perfectly right, perfectly right," said my father, "and it
shall not occur again. Ah! my poor boy," he added in an irrepressible
outburst, "you suffer for lack of a mother's care. I do what I can,
but a man cannot supply a woman's place to a child."

Mrs. Bundle's feelings at this soliloquy may be imagined. "You might
have knocked me down with a feather, sir," she assured the butler
(unlikely as it seemed!) in describing the scene afterwards. She found
strength, however, to reply to my father's remark.

"Indeed, sir, a mother's place never can be filled to a child by no
one whatever. Least of all such a mother as he had in your dear lady.
But he's a boy, sir, and not a girl, and in all reason a father is
what he'll chiefly look to in a year or two. And for the meanwhile,
sir, I ask you, could Master Reginald look better or behave better
than he did afore the company come? It's only natural as smart ladies
who knows nothing whatever of children, and how they should be brought
up, and what's for their good, should think it a kindness to spoil
them. Any one may see the lady has no notion of children, and would be
the ruin of Master