BABYHOOD.--PRETTY FLOWERS.--THE ROSE-COLOURED TULIPS.


The matter of the baby's cap disturbed the little ladies. It seemed so
like the beginning of a fulfilment of the lawyer's croakings.

Miss Kitty had made it. She had never seen a baby without a cap before,
and the sight was unusual if not indecent. But Miss Kitty was a quick
needlewoman, and when the new cap was fairly tied over the thick crop of
silky black hair, the baby looked so much less like Puck, and so much
more like the rest of the baby world, that it was quite a relief.

Miss Kitty's feelings may therefore be imagined when, going to the baby
just after the parson's departure, she found him in open rebellion
against his cap. It had been tied on whilst he was asleep, and his eyes
were no sooner open than he commenced the attack. He pulled with one
little brown hand and tugged with the other; he dragged a rosette over
his nose and got the frills into his eyes; he worried it as a puppy
worries your handkerchief if you tie it around its face and tell it to
"look like a grandmother." At last the strings gave way, and he cast it
triumphantly out of the clothes-basket which served him for cradle.

Successive efforts to induce him to wear it proved vain, so Thomasina
said the weather was warm and his hair was very thick, and she parted
this and brushed it, and Miss Kitty gave the cap to the farm-bailiff's
baby, who took to it as kindly as a dumpling to a pudding-cloth.

How the boy was ever kept inside his christening clothes, Thomasina said
she did not know. But when he got into the parson's arms he lay quite
quiet, which was a good omen. That he might lack no advantage, Miss