not like. He had a knob at the end of his
nose, and Beth laughed at it, in punishment of which, as she used to
believe, her own nose developed a little knob at the end. Her mind was
very much exercised about the doctor and his household. He and his
brother and sister used to live together, but now he lived alone, and
on a bed in one of the rooms, according to Jane Nettles, there were
furs, and lovely silks, satins, and laces, all being eaten by moths
and destroyed because there was no one to look after them. It seemed
such a pity, but whose were they? Where was the lady?

Bridget used to come up to the nursery when the children were in bed,
to talk to Jane Nettles, and look out of the window. Those gossips in
the nursery were a great source of disturbance to Beth when she ought
to have been composing herself to sleep. She recollected nothing of
the conversations more corrupting than that ghastly account of how the
girl was exhumed, so it is likely that the servants exercised some
discretion when they dropped their voices to a whisper, as they often
did; but these whispered colloquies made her restless and cross, and
brought down upon her a smart order to go to sleep, to which she used
to answer defiantly, "I will if you'll ask me a riddle." One of the
riddles was: "Between two sticks, between two stones, between two old
men's shin-bones. What's that?" The answer had something to do with a
graveyard, but Beth could not remember what.

She used to suffer a small martyrdom in her little crib on those
evenings from what she called "snuff up her nose," a hot, dry, burning
sensation which must have been caused by a stuffy room, and the
feverish state she tossed herself into when she was kept awake after
her regular hour for sleep. Sometimes she sat up in bed suddenly, and
cried aloud. Then Jane Nettles would push her down again on her pillow
roughly, and threaten to call mamma if she wasn't good directly.
Occasionally mamma heard her, and came up of her own accord, and shook
her by the shoulder, and scolded her. Then Beth would lie still
sobbing silently, and wretched as only a lonely, uncomprehended, and
uncomplaining child can be. No one had the faintest conception of what
she suffered. Her naughtinesses were remembered against her, but her
latent tenderness was never suspected. Once the old Doctor said:
"That's a peculiarly sensitive, high-strung, nervous child; you must
be gentle with her," and both parents had stared a