had made up their minds to give him two thousand guineas a year as head-
gardener, on accounts of his being so true a friend to 'em. Boots could
have wished at the moment that the earth would have opened and swallowed
him up, he felt so mean, with their beaming eyes a looking at him, and
believing him. Well, sir, he turned the conversation as well as he
could, and he took 'em down Love Lane to the water-meadows, and there
Master Harry would have drowned himself in half a moment more, a getting
out a water-lily for her,--but nothing daunted that boy. Well, sir, they
was tired out. All being so new and strange to 'em, they was tired as
tired could be. And they laid down on a bank of daisies, like the
children in the wood, leastways meadows, and fell asleep.

Boots don't know--perhaps I do,--but never mind, it don't signify either
way--why it made a man fit to make a fool of himself to see them two
pretty babies a lying there in the clear still sunny day, not dreaming
half so hard when they was asleep as they done when they was awake. But,
Lord! when you come to think of yourself, you know, and what a game you
have been up to ever since you was in your own cradle, and what a poor
sort of a chap you are, and how it's always either Yesterday with you, or
else To-morrow, and never To-day, that's where it is!

Well, sir, they woke up at last, and then one thing was getting pretty
clear to Boots, namely, that Mrs. Harry Walmerses, Junior's, temper was
on the move. When Master Harry took her round the waist, she said he
"teased her so;" and when he says, "Norah, my young May Moon, your Harry
tease you?" she tells him, "Yes; and I want to go home!"

A biled fowl, and baked bread-and-butter pudding, brought Mrs. Walmers up
a little; but Boots could have wished, he must privately own to me, to
have seen her more sensible of the woice of love, and less abandoning of