The little girl, who had awaked, without signalling the fact in the
usual manner, fixed her large, fawn-like eyes upon him in peaceful
wonder. He knelt down once more, took her in his arms, and kissed her
gravely and solemnly. It was charming to see with what tender
awkwardness he held her, as if she were some precious thing made of
frail stuff that might easily be broken. My curiosity had already
prompted me to examine the basket, which contained a variety of clean,
tiny articles,--linen, stockings, a rattle with the distinct impress
of its nationality, and several neatly folded dresses, among which a
long, white, elaborately embroidered one, marked by a slip of paper as
"Baby's Christening Robe."

I will not reproduce the long and serious consultation which followed;
be it sufficient to chronicle the result. I hastened homeward, and had
my landlady, Mrs. Harrison, roused from her midnight slumbers; she
was, as I knew, a woman of strong maternal instincts, who was fond of
referring to her experience in that line,--a woman to whom your
thought would naturally revert in embarrassing circumstances. She
responded promptly and eagerly to my appeal; the situation evidently
roused all the latent romance of her nature, and afforded her no small
satisfaction. She spent a half hour in privacy with the baby, who
re-appeared fresh and beaming in a sort of sacerdotal Norse
night-habit which was a miracle of neatness.

"Bless her little heart," ejaculated Mrs. Harrison, as the small fat
hands persisted in pulling her already demoralized side curls. "She
certainly knows me;" then in an aside to Storm: "The mother, whoever
she may be, sir, is a lady. I never seed finer linen as long as I
lived; and every single blessed piece is embroidered with two letters
which I reckon means the name of the child."

Storm bowed his head silently and sighed. But when the baby, after
having rather indifferently submitted to a caress from me, stretched
out its arms to him and consented with great good humor to a final
good-night kiss, large tears rolled down over his cheeks, while he
smiled, as I thought only the angels could smile.

I am obliged to add before the curtain is dropped upon this nocturnal
drama, that my friend was guilty of an astonishing piece of Vandalism.
When my landlady had deposited the sleeping child in his large,
exquisitely carved and canopied bed (which, as he declared, made him
feel as if a hundred departed grandees were h