He was slow to reach them, though in other respects he grew fast.

When he began to walk he would walk barefoot. To be out of doors was his
delight, but on the threshold of the house he always sat down and
discarded his shoes and stockings. Thomasina bastinadoed the soles of
his feet with the soles of his shoes "to teach him the use of them," so
she said. But Miss Kitty sighed, and thought of the lawyer's prediction.

There was no blinking the fact that the child was as troublesome as he
was pretty. The very demon of mischief danced in his black eyes, and
seemed to possess his feet and fingers as if with quicksilver. And if,
as Thomasina said, you "never knew what he would be at next," you might
also be pretty sure that it would be something he ought to have left
undone.

John Broom early developed a taste for glass and crockery, and as the
china cupboard was in that part of the house to which he by social
standing also belonged, he had many chances to seize upon cups, jugs,
and dishes. If detected with any thing that he ought not to have had, it
was his custom to drop the forbidden toy and toddle off as fast as his
unpractised feet would carry him. The havoc which this caused amongst
the glass and china was bewildering in a household where tea-sets and
dinner-sets had passed from generation to generation, where slapdash,
giddy-pated kitchenmaids never came, where Miss Betty washed the best
teacups in the parlor, where Thomasina was more careful than her
mistress, and the breaking of a single plate was a serious matter, and,
if beyond rivetting, a misfortune.

Thomasina soon found that her charge was safest, as he was happiest, out
of doors. A very successful device was to shut him up in the drying