rely danger lest this
interesting accomplishment should be declining also.

"I am always imitating the talk I hear in the cottages," he remarked; "I
may have lost it so."

"Perhaps, as Cray goes to so many places, it may get scattered about,"
said little Bertram; but he was speedily checked by Johnnie, who
observed with severity that they didn't want any "thrimp thauth."

"He mutht thimmer," said Johnnie, "thath what he mutht do. He mutht be
thrown into an iron pot, with a gallon of therry cobbler, and a pumpkin
pie, and thome baked beanth, and a copy of the Biglow Paperth, and a
handful of thalt, and they mutht all thimmer together till he geth
properly flavoured again."

"Wouldn't it be safer if he was only dipped in?" asked the same "shrimp"
who had spoken before.

As this was the second time he had taken this awful liberty, he would
probably have been dismissed the assembly but for the presence of his
father. As it was, Johnnie and Crayshaw both looked at him, not fiercely
but steadily, whereupon the little fellow with deep blushes slid gently
from his chair under the table.

A few days after this midnight repast, Emily, knowing that John Mortimer
was away a good deal, and having a perfectly gratuitous notion that his
children must be dull in consequence, got Valentine to drive her over
one morning to invite them to spend a day at Brandon's house.

A great noise of shouting, drumming on battledores, and blowing through
discordant horns, let them know, as they came up the lane, that the
community was in a state of high activity; and when they reached the
garden gate they were just in time to see the whole family vanish round
a corner, running at full speed after a donkey on which Johnnie was
riding.

The visitors drove inside the gate, and waited five minutes, when the
donkey, having made the circuit of the premises, came galloping up, the
whole tribe of young Mortimers after him. They received Emily with
loving cordiality, and accounted for the violent exercise they had been
taking by the declaration that this donkey never would go at all, unless
he heard a great noise and clatter at his heels.

"So that if Johnnie wanted to go far, as far as to London," observed one
of the panting family, "it would be awkward, wouldn't it?"

"And he's only a second-hand donkey, either," exclaimed little Janie in
deep disparagement of the beast; "father bought him of the blacksmith."

"But isn't it good fun to see him g