ore we
come to bricks and mortar."

"I've thought of it every way, my dear, I'm afraid," said my mother with
a sigh. But she had full confidence in my father--a trouble shared with
him was half cured, and she soon fell asleep.

She certainly had a vivid imagination, though it never was cultivated to
literary ends. Perhaps, after all, I inherited that idle fancy, those
unsatisfied yearnings of my restless heart, from her! Mental
peculiarities are said to come from one's mother.

It was Jem who inherited her sweet temper.

Dear old Jem! He and I were the best of good friends always, and that
sweet temper of his had no doubt much to do with it. He was very much
led by me, though I was the younger, and whatever mischief we got into
it was always my fault.

It was I who persuaded him to run away from school, under the, as it
proved, insufficient disguise of walnut-juice on our faces and hands.
It was I who began to dig the hole which was to take us through from the
kitchen-garden to the other side of the world. (Jem helped me to fill it
up again, when the gardener made a fuss about our having chosen the
asparagus-bed as the point of departure, which we did because the earth
was soft there.) In desert islands or castles, balloons or boats, my
hand was first and foremost, and mischief or amusement of every kind, by
earth, air, or water, was planned for us by me.

Now and then, however, Jem could crow over me. How he did deride me when
I asked our mother the foolish question--"Have bees whiskers?"

The bee who betrayed me into this folly was a bumble of the utmost
beauty. The bars of his coat "burned" as "brightly" as those of the
tiger in Wombwell's menagerie, and his fur was softer than my mother's
black velvet mantle. I knew, for I had kissed him lightly as he sat on
the window-frame. I had seen him brushing first one side and then the
other side of his head, with an action so exactly that of my father
brushing his whiskers on Sunday morning, that I thought the bee might be
trimming his; not knowing that he was sweeping the flower-dust off his
antennae with his legs, and putting it into his waistcoat pocket to make
bee bread of.

It was the liberty I took in kissing him that made him not sit still
any more, and hindered me from examining his cheeks for myself. He began
to dance all over the window, humming his own tune, and before he got
tired of dancing he found a chink open at the top sash, and sailed away
like a