other, than if Bobby and Tou Tou
and I were to be submitted to the poor old thing's notice."

Mother looks rather at sea.

"What are you talking about? What poor old thing? Oh! I understand."

"He will have to see us," says Tou Tou, rather lugubriously, "he cannot
help it--at prayers."

Tou Tou has descended from the table, and is standing propped against
mother's knee, twisting one leg with ingenious grace round the other.

"Bless your heart," says the Brat, comfortingly, "he will never find out
that we are there: do you suppose that his blear old eyes will see all
across that big room, economically lit up by one pair of candles?"

Mother smiles.

"Wait till you see whether he has blear eyes!"

"He must be very ancient," says Algy, in all the insolence of twenty,
leaning his flat back against the mantel-shelf, "as he was at school
with father."

"Father has not blear eyes," remarks Bobby, dryly. "Would God he had!
For then perhaps he would not see our little vices quite so clearly with
them as he does."

"But then father has not been in India," retorts Algy, stretching.
"India plays the deuce with one's organs and appurtenances."

"I wish you joy of him," say I, rising flushed and untidy from my knees,
having successfully smashed the taffy into little bits; "from soup to
walnuts, you will have to undergo a ceaseless tyranny of tales about
hitmaghars and dak bungalows and Choto Lazery: which of us has not
suffered in our day from the horrible monotony of ideas of an old
Indian?"

"Never you mind, Barbara!" cries the Brat, giving her a sounding
brotherly pat on the back. "Pay no attention to her."

"'What great events from trivial causes spring!' as the poet says: you
may live to bless the day that old Roger crossed our doors."

"As how?" says Barbara, laughing, and rocking herself backward and
forward in a veteran American rocking-chair which, at different periods
of our history, has served most of us the dirty turn of tipping us over,
and presenting us reversed to the eyes of our family.

"Never you mind," repeats the Brat, oracularly; "truth is stranger than
fiction! odd things happen: I read in the paper the other day of a man
who pulled up the window for an old woman in the train, and she died at
once--I do not mean on the spot, but very soon after, and when she
died--listen, please, all of you--" (speaking very slowly and
impressively)--"she left him _two thousand pounds_ a year."

"I wish I saw