significantly, that the noises in the dressing-room above had entirely
ceased.

The instant she satisfied herself of this, her maternal imagination,
uninfluenced by what Mr. Thorpe had said below stairs, conjured up an
appalling vision of Zack before his father's looking-glass, with his
chin well lathered, and a bare razor at his naked throat. The child had
indeed a singular aptitude for amusing himself with purely adult
occupations. Having once been incautiously taken into church by his
nurse, to see a female friend of hers married, Zack had, the very next
day, insisted on solemnizing the nuptial ceremony from recollection,
before a bride and bridegroom of his own age, selected from his
playfellows in the garden of the square. Another time, when the
gardener had incautiously left his lighted pipe on a bench while he
went to gather a flower for one of the local nursery-maids, whom he was
accustomed to favor horticulturally in this way, Zack contrived,
undetected, to take three greedy whiffs of pigtail in close succession;
was discovered reeling about the grass like a little drunkard; and had
to be smuggled home (deadly pale, and bathed in cold perspiration) to
recover, out of his mother's sight, in the congenial gloom of the back
kitchen. Although the precise infantine achievements here cited were
unknown to Mrs. Thorpe, there were plenty more, like them, which she
had discovered; and the warning remembrance of which now hurried the
poor lady up the second flight of stairs in a state of breathless
agitation and alarm.

Zack, however, had not got at the razors; for they were all locked up,
as Mr. Thorpe had declared. But he had, nevertheless, discovered in the
dressing-room a means of perpetrating domestic mischief, which his
father had never thought of providing against. Finding that kicking,