“Ye should remember,” she observed, with severity, “that ye had already left your house when they painted it.”

“Remember it!” exclaimed the gardener, straightening himself; “ay, ay, I remember it—­coming along the lane that my garden sloped down to, so that every inch of it could be seen.  It had been all raked over, and there, just out of the ground, growing up in mustard-and-cress letters as long as my arm, I saw ’This genteel residence to let, lately occupied by N. Swan, Esq.’ I took my hob-nailed boots to them last words, and I promise you I made the mustard-and-cress fly.”

“Well, ye see,” observed Miss Christie, who was perfectly serious, “there is great truth in your saying that those children did too much as they pleased; but ye must consider that Mr. Mortimer didn’t like to touch any of them, because they were not his own.”

“That’s just it, ma’am, and Mrs. Mortimer didn’t like to touch any of them because they were her own; so between the two they got to be, I don’t say as bad as these, but—­” Here he shook his head, and leaning his back to the fruit-house door, began diligently to peel the fruit for an assembly, silent, because eating.  “As for Master Giles,” he went on, more to torment the old lady than to disparage the gentleman in question, “before ever he went to school, he chalked a picture that he called my arms on the tool house-door, three turnips as natural as life, and a mad kind of bird flourishing its wings about, that he said was a swan displayed.  Underneath, for a morter, was wrote, ’All our geese air swans.’  Now what do you call that for ten years old?”

“Well, well,” said Aunt Christie, “that’s nearly twenty years ago.”

Then the fruit being all finished, N. Swan, Esq., shut up his clasp-knife, and the story being also finished, his audience ran away, excepting Miss Christie, to whom he said—­

“But I was fond of those children, you’ll understand, though they were powerful plagues.”

“Swan,” said the old lady, “ye’ll never be respectit by children.  You’re just what ye often call yourself, soft.”

“And what’s the good of being rough with ’em, ma’am?  I can no more make ’em sober and sensible than I could straighten out their bushes of curly hair.  No, not though I was to take my best rake to it.  They’re powerful plagues, bless ’em! but so far as I can see, we’re in this world mainly to bring them forrard in it.  I remember when my Joey was a very little chap, he was playing by me with a tin sword that he was proud of.  I was sticking peas in my own garden, and a great hulking sergeant came by, and stopped a minute to ask his road.  ‘Don’t you be afraid of me,’ says Joey, very kind.  ’I won’t hurt ‘e.’  That man laughed, but the water stood in his eyes.  He’d lost such a one, he said.  Children air expensive, but it’s very cutting to lose ’em.  I’ve never seen any of the Mortimers in that trouble yet, though.”