Eight tall candles in two heavy old silver candelabra lighted the large round table, and on the dazzling white cloth was spread such a feast as little children love:  cakes of many kinds, jams and marmalade, buns, muffins, and crisp biscuits fresh from the oven, scones both white and brown, and the rich golden-yellow clotted cream, in the preparation of which Cornwall pretends to surpass her sister Devon, as in her cider and perry and smoked pig.  It is only natural that Cornwall, in her stately seclusion at the end of Western England, should look down upon Devonshire as sophisticated and almost cockney.  Cornwall is to Devon as the real Scottish Highlands are to the Trosachs.  Besides the cakes and jams and cream-bowl there were flowers:  Christmas roses, and real roses, yellow and red—­such flowers as only grow in rich men’s greenhouses; and there was a big silver urn in which Laddie and Lassie could see their faces, red and broad and shining, as they squeezed themselves each against one of Adela’s elbows.

“O Uncle Tom,” suddenly exclaimed Lassie, in a rapturous voice, “we shall never die here!”

“Not for want of food, certainly, Lassie.”

The children had eaten nothing since a very early dinner in Plymouth, and on being pressed to eat by Miss Hawberk and Mr. Danby, showed themselves frankly greedy.  Sir John did nothing but look on and wonder at them.  They showed him a new phase of humanity.  Did life begin so soon?  Was the mind so fully awakened while the body was still so tiny?  “How old are you, Mistress Moppet?” he asked, when Moppet had finished her first slice of saffron-cake.

“Four and a quarter.”

Not five years old.  She had lived in the world less than five years.  She talked of what she had thought and believed when she was little, and she seemed to know as much about life as he did at sixty-five.

“You are a wonderful little woman, not to be afraid of going out visiting without your nurse.”

“Nurse!” echoed Moppet, staring at him with her big gray eyes.  “What’s a nurse?”

“She doesn’t know,” explained Laddie:  “we never had a nurse.  It’s a woman like the one Julie has to take care of her, Moppet,” he explained, condescendingly, “a bonne we call her.  But we’ve never had a bonne” he added, with a superior air.

“Indeed?” exclaimed Sir John, “then pray who has taken care of you, put you to bed at night, and washed and dressed you of a morning, taken you out for walks, or wheeled you in a perambulator?”

“Mother,” cried the boy.  “Mother does all that—­except for me.  I dress myself—­I take my own bath.  Mother says I’m growing quite inde—­in-de—­”

“Pendent!” screamed Moppet across the table.  “What a silly boy you are:  you always forget the names of things.”

Moppet was getting excited.  The small cheeks were flushed, and the big eyes were getting bigger, and Moppet was inclined to gesticulate a good deal when she talked, and to pat the table-cloth with two little hands to give point to her speech.