tongue to express surprise that an infant a day
old should cut a tooth, when I suddenly recollected that Richard III.
was born with teeth. Feeling myself to be on unfamiliar ground, I
suppressed my criticism. It was well I did so, for in the next breath I
was advised that half a year had elapsed since the previous evening.

"Andy 's had a hard six months of it," said Mr. Jaffrey, with the
well-known narrative air of fathers. "We 've brought him up by hand. His
grandfather, by the way, was brought up by the bottle"--and brought down
by it, too, I added mentally, recalling Mr. Sewell's account of the old
gentleman's tragic end.

Mr. Jaffrey then went on to give me a history of Andy's first six
months, omitting no detail however insignificant or irrelevant. This
history I would in turn inflict upon the reader, if I were only certain
that he is one of those dreadful parents who, under the aegis of
friendship, bore you at a streets corner with that remarkable thing
which Freddy said the other day, and insist on singing to you, at an
evening parly, the Iliad of Tommy's woes.

But to inflict this _enfantillage_ upon the unmarried reader would be
an act of wanton cruelty. So I pass over that part of Andy's biography,
and, for the same reason, make no record of the next four or five
interviews I had with Mr. Jaffrey. It will be sufficient to state
that Andy glided from extreme infancy to early youth with astonishing
celerity--at the rate of one year per night, if I remember correctly;
and--must I confess it?--before the week came to an end, this invisible
hobgoblin of a boy was only little less of a reality to me than to Mr.
Jaffrey.

At first I had lent myself to the old dreamer's whim with a keen
perception of the humor of the thing; but by and by I found that I
was talking and thinking of Miss Mehetabel's son as though he were a
veritable personage. Mr. Jafifrey spoke of the child with such an air of
conviction!--as if Andy were playing among his toys in the next room, or
making mud-pies down in the yard. In these conversations, it should be
observed, the child was never supposed to be present, except on that
single occasion when Mr. Jafifrey leaned over the cradle. After one of
our _seances_ I would lie awake until the small hours, thinking of the
boy, and then fall asleep only to have indigestible dreams about him.
Through the day, and sometimes in the midst of complicated calculations,
I would catch myself wondering wh