"Thunder and damnation!" he exclaimed, as he strode away after the
encounter; "'tis the ugliest yet. A yellow-faced girl brat, with eyes
like an owl's in an ivy-bush, and with a voice like a very peacocks.
Another mawking, plain slut that no man will take off my hands."

He did not see her again for six years. But little wit was needed to
learn that 'twas best to keep her out of his sight, as her sisters were
kept, and this was done without difficulty, as he avoided the wing of the
house where the children lived, as if it were stricken with the plague.

But the child Clorinda, it seemed, was of lustier stock than her older
sisters, and this those about her soon found out to their grievous
disturbance. When Mother Posset had drawn her from under her dead
mother's body she had not left shrieking for an hour, but had kept up her
fierce cries until the roof rang with them, and the old woman had jogged
her about and beat her back in the hopes of stifling her, until she was
exhausted and dismayed. For the child would not be stilled, and seemed
to have such strength and persistence in her as surely infant never
showed before.

"Never saw I such a brat among all I have brought into the world," old
Posset quavered. "She hath the voice of a six-months boy. It cracks my
very ears. Hush thee, then, thou little wild cat."

This was but the beginning. From the first she grew apace, and in a few
months was a bouncing infant, with a strong back, and a power to make
herself heard such as had not before appeared in the family. When she
desired a thing, she yelled and roared with such a vigour as left no
peace for any creature about her until she was humoured, and this being