the words, “Are you mad with me?” I could not occupy my cold and dreary pinnacle a moment longer, but sought an early opportunity of squeezing her hand two seats behind the voluminous asylum of Briggs’s toes, and whispering, slightly confused by intensity of feeling, that if I had done any thing I was sorry for, I was willing to be forgiven.  From that moment I was Miss Tucker’s slave.  Oh, woman, woman!  The string on which you play us is as long as life; it ties your baby-bib; it laces your queenly bodice; and on its slenderest tag we dangle everywhere!—­Little Briggs and I. (From Little Brother and Other Genre Pictures.)

SELECTIONS FROM A BRACE OF BOYS.

I am a bachelor uncle.  That, as a mere fact, might happen to anybody; but I am a bachelor uncle by internal fitness.  I am one essentially, just as I am an individual of the Caucasian division of the human race; and if, through untoward circumstances,—­which Heaven forbid,—­I should lose my present position, I shouldn’t be surprised if you saw me out in the Herald under “Situations Wanted—­Males.”  Thanks to a marrying tendency in the rest of my family, I have now little need to advertise, all the business being thrown into my way which a single member of my profession can attend to....

I meander, like a desultory, placid river of an old bachelor as I am, through the flowery mead of several nurseries.  I am detained by all the little roots that run down into me to drink happiness, but I linger longest among the children of my sister Lu.

Lu married Mr. Lovegrove.  He is a merchant, retired with a fortune amassed by the old-fashioned, slow processes of trade, and regards the mercantile life of the present day only as so much greed and gambling Christianly baptized....  Lu is my favorite sister; Lovegrove an unusually good article of brother-in-law and I cannot say that any of my nieces and nephews interest me more than their two children, Daniel and Billy, who are more unlike than words can paint them.  They are far apart in point of years; Daniel is twenty-two, Billy eleven.  I was reminded of this fact the other day by Billy, as he stood between my legs, scowling at his book of sums.

“’A boy has eighty-five turnips, and gives his sister thirty,’—­pretty present for a girl, isn’t it?” said Billy, with an air of supreme contempt.  “Could you stand such stuff,—­say?”

I put on my instructive face and answered,—­

“Well, my dear Billy, you know that arithmetic is necessary to you if you mean to be an industrious man and succeed in business.  Suppose your parents were to lose all their property, what would become of them without a little son who could make money and keep accounts?”

“Oh,” said Billy, with surprise.  “Hasn’t father got enough stamps to see him through?”

“He has now, I hope; but people don’t always keep them.  Suppose they should go by some accident, when your father was too old to make any more stamps for himself?”