“Talk to me about her, Charlie dear.”

“About whom, little one?” asked Charlie, turning his eyes toward me with a little lazy look of inquiry.

“About your mother, Charlie:  weren’t you thinking about her just now?”

“I don’t know—­maybe I was.  Dear mother! you don’t find many women like her now-a-days.”

Reader, that was my first glimpse of Charlie’s hobby.  And from the luck-less moment when I so innocently invited him to mount it, up to the time when I forcibly compelled him to dismount from it, I had ample opportunity to exercise my “smiling patience, sublime dignity and heroic fortitude.”  Whether or not I improved my opportunities properly, I will leave you to judge for yourself.  But for two whole years “how mother did it” seemed to be the watchword of Charlie’s existence, and was the bete noir of mine.

So long as Charlie and I were in Paradise the house kept itself, and very nicely it did it too, but by the time we were ready to come back to earth the perfect servants, who had been taking such good care of themselves, and our two daft selves into the bargain, were found to be sadly demoralized.  The discovery came upon us gradually.  I think my husband noticed the decadence as soon as I did, but I wasn’t going to invite his attention to the fact; and he, I suppose, thought that I thought that everything was just as it should be.

One of Charlie’s inherited manias was for early rising—­a habit which would have been highly commendable and undeniably invaluable in a laboring man, but which struck me, who had an equally strong mania for not rising early, as extremely inconvenient and the least little bit absurd.  Charlie got up early simply because “mother did it” before him; and after he had risen at earliest dawn and dressed himself, he had nothing better to do than walk out on the front gallery, locate himself in a big wicker chair, tilt his chair back and elevate his feet to the top of the banisters, and stare out over the cottonfields.  This position he would maintain, probably, about twenty minutes.  Then the pangs of hunger would render him restless, and he would draw out his watch to note the time of day.  The next step in the formula would bring him back to my room door while I was still sleepily trying to reconnect the broken links of a dream, from which vain effort he would startle me into wide-awake reality by a stentorian “Lulie, Lulie!  Come, wife—­it’s breakfast-time.”

Upon which, instead of “heroic fortitude,” I would treat him to a little cross “Please yell at the cook, Charlie, and not at me.  I’m sure if people will get up at such unearthly hours, they should expect to be kept waiting for their breakfast.”

Then the spirit of unrest would impel Charlie toward the back door, where I would hear him commanding, exhorting, entreating.

Mentally registering a vow to give my husband a dose of Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup on the coming night, I would relinquish all hope of another nap, get up and dress myself, and join my roaring lion on the front gallery, where we would both sit meekly waiting for the allied forces of kitchen and dining-room to decide upon the question of revictualing us.