s.

'And which of them is it who is lulled by the strains of 'As in
proesenti?''

'Which?' said James, somewhat affronted. 'Can't you tell sixteen
months from five?'

'I beg her pardon; but I can't construct a whole child from an inch of
mottled leg--as Professor Owen would a megalosaurus from a tooth. Does
she walk?'

'Poor child, she _must_!' said James. 'She thinks it very hard to have
two sisters so little younger than herself,' and he peeped under the
plaid at the little brown head, and drew it closer round, with a look
of almost melancholy tenderness, guarding carefully against touching
her with his cold hands.

'She will think it all the better by-and-by,' said Louis.

'You had better not stay here in the cold. I'll come when I have heard
that boy's imposition and looked over these exercises.' And he ran his
hand through his hair again.

'Don't! You look like enough to a lion looking out of a bush to
frighten ten boys already,' said Louis. 'I'll do the exercises,'
pulling the copy-books away.

'What, you don't trust me?' as James detained them.

'No, I don't,' said James, his cousin's brightness awakening his
livelier manner. 'It needs an apprenticeship to be up to their
blunders.'

'Let me read them to you. I gave notice to Isabel that I am come to
dinner, and no doubt she had rather I were disposed of.'

James objected no farther, and the dry labour was illuminated by the
discursive remarks and moralizings which Louis allowed to flow in their
natural idle course, both to divert his dispirited cousin, and to
conceal from himself how much cause there was for depression. When the
victim of the imposition approached, Louis prevented the dreaded clumsy
entrance, seized on a Virgil, and himself heard the fifty lines,
scarcely making them serve their purpose as a punishment, but sending
the culprit away in an unusually amiable temper.

Services from Louis were too natural to James to be requited with
thanks; but he was not uncivil in his notice of a wrong tense that had
been allowed to pass, and the question was argued with an eagerness
which showed that he was much enlivened. On the principle that Louis
must care for all that was his, as he rose to take the still-sleeping
child upstairs, he insisted that his cousin should come with him, if
only for the curiosity of looking at the other two little animals, and
learning the difference between them and Kitty, at whom he still looked
as if her g