suddenly made their retreat; while we, now trembling, detected culprits,
took up a line of march for the house.

Not so, Fred; defying Mammy to capture him, and laughing at her dismay,
he started off on a run, and she after him in full pursuit. We watched
the chase from the nursery-window; and as Fred was none of the thinnest,
and Mammy somewhat resembled a meal-bag with a string tied round the
middle, it proved to be quite exciting. But it was brought to an
untimely end by the apparition of a pair of spectacles over the fence;
said spectacles being the undisputed property of a middle-aged
gentleman--a bachelor, who, we suspected, always stayed home from church
on Sunday afternoons to keep the neighbors in order. With
horror-stricken eyes he had beheld only the latter part of the scene,
and conceiving the old nurse to be as bad as her rebellious charge, he
called out from his garden, which communicated with ours:

"My good woman, do you know that this is Sunday?--Depend upon it, a
person of your years would feel much better to be quietly reading in
your own apartment, than racing about the garden in this unseemly
manner."

Poor Mammy! she was well aware of this before; flushed, heated, and
almost overcome with fatigue, she looked the very picture of
uncomfortableness; and this last aggravation increased the feeling to a
tenfold degree. At that moment, Fred, unconsciously, stumbled into her
very arms; she looked up--the spectacles had disappeared--and convinced
of this fact, she bore him in triumph to the nursery.

We had all expected personal chastisement, at the very least, but we
were thrown into a greater degree of horror and dismay than could well