know."

The artist perhaps invented this pretty speech, but the "Good Night!
Good Night! my dear, sweet, pretty mamma" is of the very spirit of the
redundancy by which children hope in heaping words together to express
accumulation of emotion. Du Maurier's children never make the nasty pert
answers upon which, for their nearly impossible but always vulgar
smartness, the providers of jokes about children for the comic papers
generally depend. He is simply going on with his "novel"--_The Tale of
the House_ it might be called--when he affords us realistic glimpses of
nursery conversation.

_Mamma_. "What is Baby crying for, Maggie?"

_Maggie_. "I don't know."

_Mamma_. "And what are you looking so indignant about?"

_Maggie_. "That nasty, greedy dog's been and took and eaten my
punge-take!"

_Mamma_. "Why, I saw you eating a sponge-cake a minute ago!"

_Maggie_. "O--that was Baby's."

We need hardly labour the point of the "been and took and eaten" as an
instance of felicity in reconstructing children's conversation, and
making the verisimilitude to their grammar the charm of the
reconstruction.