expressive face. "Will Ernie let the wicked man kill
Mirry?"

He looked at his small hands and arms, then extended them wistfully.

"Ernie will tell good Jesus," he said, "and he will make Ernie grow
big--ever so big--to tie the man and put him in a bag like Clayton's
cat."

The burlesque was irresistible, and none the less so that the child was
so direfully in earnest. To his infant imagination no worse disaster
than had befallen Clayton's cat could be devised. This animal, adored by
him, had been bagged and exiled, perhaps drowned for aught I know, for
stealing cheese from the cupboard sacred to Clayton, by that vengeful
potentate, to the despair of Ernie. The idolized kittens, too, which had
followed her, had disappeared with their mother, and days of infant
melancholy ensued, during which the canaries before referred to were
brought as substitutes. The faithful heart still clung to its feline
passion, it was evident, though for weeks the memory of that hapless cat
had been ignored and its name unmentioned.

I believe, after my momentary wrath was over, I should have been content
with the punishment suggested by the child, as sufficient even for Basil
Bainrothe.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 6: The raft on which Miss Lamarque and her family had found
refuge had been swept by the tempest of nearly every soul that clung to
it, after a terrible night of storm and rain, during which that
courageous lady--that Sybarite of society--sustained the fainting souls
of her companions by singing the grand anthems of her Church, in a voice
loud, clear, and sweet as that of a dying swan. One child was saved of
the nine little ones, and the brother and sister remained almost alone
on the raft. Let it be here mentioned that, at no period of her
subsequent life, a long and apparently prosperous one, could Miss
Lamarque bear to hear the circumstances of the wreck alluded to. Mr.
Dunmore and his companions found a watery grave.]

CHAPTER IX.

A nervous headache, that confined me to my bed for several days,
succeeded the degrading and exciting scene through which I had passed,
and, as Mrs. Clayton had at the same time one of her prostrating
neuralgic attacks, the services of Dinah were in active requisition.
During my own peculiar phase of suffering, the small racket of Ernie,
unnoticed in hours of health, grated painfully on my ear, and I caught
eagerly at the proposition of the negress to take him down-stairs for a
walk and