Miss Kitty’s feelings may therefore be imagined when, going to the baby just after the parson’s departure, she found him in open rebellion against his cap.  It had been tied on whilst he was asleep, and his eyes were no sooner open than he commenced the attack.  He pulled with one little brown hand and tugged with the other; he dragged a rosette over his nose and got the frills into his eyes; he worried it as a puppy worries your handkerchief if you tie it around its face and tell it to “look like a grandmother.”  At last the strings gave way, and he cast it triumphantly out of the clothes-basket which served him for cradle.

Successive efforts to induce him to wear it proved vain, so Thomasina said the weather was warm and his hair was very thick, and she parted this and brushed it, and Miss Kitty gave the cap to the farm-bailiff’s baby, who took to it as kindly as a dumpling to a pudding-cloth.

How the boy was ever kept inside his christening clothes, Thomasina said she did not know.  But when he got into the parson’s arms he lay quite quiet, which was a good omen.  That he might lack no advantage, Miss Betty stood godmother for him, and the parish clerk and the sexton were his godfathers.

He was named John.

“A plain, sensible name,” said Miss Betty.  “And while we are about it,” she added, “we may as well choose his surname.  For a surname he must have, and the sooner it is decided upon the better.”

Miss Kitty had made a list of twenty-seven of her favourite Christian names, which Miss Betty had sternly rejected, that everything might be plain, practical, and respectable at the outset of the tramp-child’s career.  For the same reason she refused to adopt Miss Kitty’s suggestions for a surname.

“It’s so seldom there’s a chance of choosing a surname for anybody, sister,” said Miss Kitty, “it seems a pity not to choose a pretty one.”

“Sister Kitty,” said Miss Betty, “don’t be romantic.  The boy is to be brought up in that station of life for which one syllable is ample.  I should have called him Smith if that had not been Thomasina’s name.  As it is, I propose to call him Broom.  He was found under a bush of broom, and it goes very well with John, and sounds plain and respectable.”

So Miss Betty bought a Bible, and on the flyleaf of it she wrote in her fine, round, gentlewoman’s writing—­"John Broom.  With good wishes for his welfare, temporal and eternal.  From a sincere friend!" And when the inscription was dry the Bible was wrapped in brown paper, and put by in Thomasina’s trunk till John Broom should come to years of discretion.

He was slow to reach them, though in other respects he grew fast.

When he began to walk he would walk barefoot.  To be out of doors was his delight, but on the threshold of the house he always sat down and discarded his shoes and stockings.  Thomasina bastinadoed the soles of his feet with the soles of his shoes “to teach him the use of them,” so she said.  But Miss Kitty sighed, and thought of the lawyer’s prediction.