orge was as familiar
with the family as such daily acts of kindness and intercourse could
make him.

"Do you remember, Sedley, what a fury you were in, when I cut off the
tassels of your Hessian boots, and how Miss--hem!--how Amelia rescued
me from a beating, by falling down on her knees and crying out to her
brother Jos, not to beat little George?"

Jos remembered this remarkable circumstance perfectly well, but vowed
that he had totally forgotten it.

"Well, do you remember coming down in a gig to Dr. Swishtail's to see
me, before you went to India, and giving me half a guinea and a pat on
the head? I always had an idea that you were at least seven feet high,
and was quite astonished at your return from India to find you no
taller than myself."

"How good of Mr. Sedley to go to your school and give you the money!"
exclaimed Rebecca, in accents of extreme delight.

"Yes, and after I had cut the tassels of his boots too. Boys never
forget those tips at school, nor the givers."

"I delight in Hessian boots," said Rebecca. Jos Sedley, who admired
his own legs prodigiously, and always wore this ornamental chaussure,
was extremely pleased at this remark, though he drew his legs under his
chair as it was made.

"Miss Sharp!" said George Osborne, "you who are so clever an artist,
you must make a grand historical picture of the scene of the boots.
Sedley shall be represented in buckskins, and holding one of the
injured boots in one hand; by the other he shall have hold of my
shirt-frill. Amelia shall be kneeling near him, with her little hands
up; and the picture shall have a grand allegorical title, as the
frontispieces have in the Medulla and the spelling-book."

"I shan't have time to do it here," said Rebecca. "I'll do it
when--when I'm gone." And she dropped her voice, and looked so sad and
piteous, that everybody felt how cruel her lot was, and how sorry they
would be to part with her.

"O that you could stay longer, dear Rebecca," said Amelia.

"Why?" answered the other, still more sadly. "That I may be only the
more unhap--unwilling to lose you?" And she turned away her head.
Amelia began to give way to that natural infirmity of tears which, we
have said, was one of the defects of this silly little thing. George
Osborne looked at the two young women with a touched curiosity; and
Joseph Sedley heaved something very like a sigh out of his big chest,
as he cast his eyes down towards his favourite Hessian