She had a weakness, however, for making the General cry, or she
would have been really almost a model child. Innumerable times
she had been found pressing its poor little chest to make it
"squeak;" and even pinching its tiny arms, or pulling its
innocent nose, just for the strange pleasure of hearing the yells
of despair it instantly set up. Captain Woolcot ascribed the
peculiar tendency to the fact that the child had once had a
dropsical-looking woolly lamb, from which the utmost pressure would
only elicit the faintest possible squeak: he said it was only
natural that now she had something so amenable to squeezing she
should want to utilize it.

Bunty was six, and was fat and very lazy. He hated scouting at
cricket, he loathed the very name of a paper-chase, and as for
running an errand, why, before anyone could finish saying something
was wanted he would have utterly disappeared. He was rather small
for his age;-and I don't think had ever been seen with a clean face.
Even at church, though the immediate front turned to the minister
might be passable, the people in the next pew had always an
uninterrupted view of the black rim where washing operations had
left off.

The next on the list--I am going from youngest to oldest, you
see--was the "show" Woolcot, as Pip, the eldest boy, used to say.
You have seen those exquisite child-angel faces on Raphael Tuck's
Christmas cards? I think the artist must just have dreamed of
Nell, and then reproduced the vision imperfectly. She was ten,
and had a little fairy-like figure, gold hair clustering in wonderful
waves and curls around her face, soft hazel eyes, and a little
rosebud of a mouth. She was not conceited either, her family took