by boy was just too astonished to cry, just too
proud of travelling in a carriage. He screwed up his face--and
unscrewed it again. Every now and then Tommy sat back as far as he
could from the disorder, the collection of jerking arms and legs, in
order to adjust the Plymouth spectacles, of which he is so proud, on
his small pug nose. As we passed the cross-roads, Straighty was trying
to snatch a kiss. While we drove along the Front, the children waved
their hands over the sides of the drosky, and shouted with delight.
'Twas a Bacchanal with laughter for wine. The Square turned out to
witness our arrival. "Her's come!" the kiddies cried. Dane leapt out
first, found a rabbit's head and bolted it whole. The rest of us
scrambled out. The luggage was piled up in the passage. Hastening in
his stockinged feet (he had been putting away an hour) to say that he
was on the point of coming up to station, Tony bruised a toe and barked
a shin. But it was no time to be savage. I wonder where else the two
shillings I paid for the drosky would have purchased so much delight.
Or rather, the delight was in ourselves, in the children; the two
shillings served only to unlock it.

[Sidenote: _CHILDREN_]

What precisely there is of difference between these children and those
of the middle and upper classes has always puzzled me. That there is a
difference I feel certain. A few years ago, when I had so much to do
with the boys and girls of a high school, they liked me pretty well, I
think, and trusted me, but they did not take to me, nor I very greatly
to them. They went about their business, and I about mine. If I invited
them for a walk, they came gladly, not because it was a walk with me,
but because I knew of interesting muddy places, and where to find
strange things. Their manners to me were always good: good manners
smoothed our intercourse. But in no sense were our lives interwoven. We
were side-shows, the one to the other. I was content that it should be
so, and they were too.

Here, on the other hand, my difficulty is to get rid of the children
when I wish to go out by myself. They follow me out to the Front, and
meet me there when I return, running towards me with shouting and arms
upraised, tumbling over their own toes, and taking me home as if I were
a huge pet dog of theirs. "Where be yu going?" they ask, and, "Where yu
been?" Jimmy regards me as a fixture. "When yu goes away for two or
dree days," he says, "I'll write to 'ee,