“Don’t want to run,” replied Archibald with beaming good humour.  In his passion for brevity he eliminated pronouns whenever it was possible.

“But Fanny is waiting for you.”

“Would rather stay with mother than go with Fanny and Mutton.”  That was another of his eccentricities.  Just as he had insisted that God’s “last name was Walker,” so he had begun of his own accord, and for no visible reason, to call nurse “Mutton.”  He was always fitting names of his own invention to persons; and in his selection he was guided by a principle so obscure that Gabriella had never been able to discover its origin.  Thus his grandmother from the first had been “Budd,” and he had immediately started to call Miss Polly “Pang.”

“Don’t you want to go back to the Park, Archibald?  You must finish your walk.”

“Will the poor boy be there?” He never forgot anything.  It was quite probable that he would inquire for “the poor boy” a year hence.

“Perhaps.  You might take him an apple and a penny.”

He stood gravely considering the plan, with one hand in his mother’s and one on Miss Polly’s knee.

“I’ll take Pang to nurse him,” he said when he had decided against the suggestion of the apple and the penny.  “He hasn’t any nurse, and Fanny wouldn’t like him to have hers.  I’ll take Pang.”

“But Pang isn’t a nurse, dear.  There, now, run to Fanny.  Miss Polly lives so far away she can’t stay very long.”

He went obediently, for he was usually amenable to his mother’s commands, stopping only once at the door to ask if “Pang lived as far away as God and could she manage to get a message to Him about the poor boy needing shoes?”

“I declare I can’t make out that child to save my soul,” remarked Miss Polly as he shut the door carefully and ran down the hall to the nursery.  “The more I study him the curiouser he seems to me.  If he wan’t so quick about some things you might think his wits were sort of addled—­but they ain’t, are they?  Now, whatever do you reckon put the notion in his head to call me ’Pang?”

All the smiling, circular wrinkles in her face were working with amusement while her little black eyes twinkled like jet beads above the ruddy creases in her cheeks.

“I can’t imagine, for he must have made up the word for himself.  But don’t you think he is like father, Miss Polly?  I love to hear you say so.”

“That child?  Why, he’s the very spit of yo’ pa, Gabriella, and there ain’t any two ideas about it.  I thought so the very first time I ever saw him, and now that I come to think of it, it is exactly like yo’ pa to be makin’ up all kinds of foolish names out of nothin’.  Yo’ pa used to call me Poll Parrot, that he did.”

“Mother thinks Archibald is going to be very much like him.  She saw him in the mountains last summer.”