rs. Jewel will give you a drink of milk."

"O let me go, sister!" pleaded Eugene. "She gives us bread and honey!
And I want to hear the lapwings in the meadows cry pee-wit."

"We shall have you falling into the river," said Harriet, rather
fretfully.

"No, indeed! If you fall in, I will pull you out. Young maids should not
run about the country without a gentleman to take care of them. Should
they, sister?" cried the doughty seven years' old champion.

"Who taught you that, sir?" asked Betty, trying to keep her countenance.

"I heard Mrs. Churchill say so to my papa," returned the boy. "So now,
there's a good sister. Do pray let me go!"

"If you say your tasks well, and will promise to be obedient to Harriet
and to keep away from the river, and not touch the basket of eggs."

Eugene was ready for any number of promises; and Harriet, seeing there
was no escape for her, went off with Aurelia to put on their little
three-cornered muslin handkerchiefs and broad-brimmed straw hats, while
Eugene repeated his tasks, namely, a fragment of the catechism, half
a column of spelling from the _Universal Spelling-Book_, and (Betty's
special pride) his portion of the _Orbis Sensualium Pictus_ of Johannes
Amos Comenius, the wonderful vocabulary, with still more wonderful
"cuts," that was then the small boys path to Latinity.

The Eagle, _Aquila_, the King of Birds, _Rex Avium_, looketh at the Sun,
_intuetur Solem_, as indeed he could hardly avoid doing, since in the
"cut" the sun was within a hairsbreath of his beak, while his claws were
almost touching a crow (_Corvus_) perched on a dead horse, to exemplify
how _Aves Raptores_ fed on carrion.

Thanks to Aurelia's private assistance, Eugene knew his lessons well
enough for his excitement not to make him stumble so often as to prevent
Betty's pronouncing him a good boy, and dispensing with his copy,
sum, piece, and reading, until the evening. These last were very tough
affairs, the recitation being from Shakespeare, and the reading from the
_Spectator_. There were no children's books, properly so called,
except the ballads, chap-books brought round by pedlers, often far from
edifying, and the plunge from the horn-book into general literature was,
to say the least of it, bracing.

The Delavie family was cultivated for the time. French had been brought
home as a familiar tongue, though _Telemaque_, Racine, and _Le Grand
Cyrus_ were the whole library in that language; and there w