d all the luggage
was being taken into the house. At the door-step stood a woman in
black, and she smiled largely, with dry chapped lips. Behind her was a
man, big, bony, gray, and lame as to one leg--behind him a boy of
twelve, black-haired and oily in appearance. Punch surveyed the trio,
and advanced without fear, as he had been accustomed to do in Bombay
when callers came and he happened to be playing in the veranda.

"How do you do?" said he. "I am Punch." But they were all looking at
the luggage--all except the gray man, who shook hands with Punch and
said he was a "smart little fellow." There was much running about and
banging of boxes, and Punch curled himself up on the sofa in the
dining-room and considered things.

"I don't like these people," said Punch. "But never mind. We'll go
away soon. We have always went away soon from everywhere. I wish we
was gone back to Bombay soon."

The wish bore no fruit. For six days Mamma wept at intervals, and
showed the woman in black all Punch's clothes--a liberty which Punch
resented. "But p'raps she's a new white ayah," he thought. "I'm to
call her Antirosa, but she does n't call me Sahib. She says just
Punch," he confided to Judy. "What is Antirosa?"

Judy did n't know. Neither she nor Punch had heard anything of an
animal called an aunt. Their world had been Papa and Mamma, who knew
everything, permitted everything, and loved everybody--even Punch when
he used to go into the garden at Bombay and fill his nails with mold
after the weekly nail-cutting, because, as he explained between two
strokes of the slipper to his sorely tried Father, his fingers "felt
so new at the ends."

In an undefined way Punch judged it advisable to keep both parents
between himself and the woman in black and the boy in black hair. He
did not approve of them. He liked the gray man, who had expressed a
wish to be called "Uncleharri." They nodded at each other when they
met, and the gray man showed him a little ship with rigging that took
up and down.

"She is a model of the _Brisk_--the little _Brisk_ that was sore
exposed that day at Navarino." The gray man hummed the last words and
fell into a reverie. "I'll tell you about Navarino, Punch, when we go
for walks together; and you must n't touch the ship, because she's the
_Brisk_."

Long before that walk, the first of many, was taken, they roused Punch
and Judy in the chill dawn of a February morning to say Good-bye; and
of all people in