There was no blinking the fact that the child was as troublesome as he was pretty.  The very demon of mischief danced in his black eyes, and seemed to possess his feet and fingers as if with quicksilver.  And if, as Thomasina said, you “never knew what he would be at next,” you might also be pretty sure that it would be something he ought to have left undone.

John Broom early developed a taste for glass and crockery, and as the china cupboard was in that part of the house to which he by social standing also belonged, he had many chances to seize upon cups, jugs, and dishes.  If detected with any thing that he ought not to have had, it was his custom to drop the forbidden toy and toddle off as fast as his unpractised feet would carry him.  The havoc which this caused amongst the glass and china was bewildering in a household where tea-sets and dinner-sets had passed from generation to generation, where slapdash, giddy-pated kitchenmaids never came, where Miss Betty washed the best teacups in the parlor, where Thomasina was more careful than her mistress, and the breaking of a single plate was a serious matter, and, if beyond rivetting, a misfortune.

Thomasina soon found that her charge was safest, as he was happiest, out of doors.  A very successful device was to shut him up in the drying ground, and tell him to “pick the pretty flowers.”  John Broom preferred flowers even to china cups with gilding on them.  He gathered nosegays of daisies and buttercups, and the winning way in which he would present these to the little ladies atoned, in their benevolent eyes, for many a smashed teacup.

But the tramp-baby’s restless spirit was soon weary of the drying-ground, and he set forth one morning in search of “fresh woods and pastures new.”  He had seated himself on the threshold to take off his shoes, when he heard the sound of Thomasina’s footsteps, and, hastily staggering to his feet, toddled forth without farther delay.  The sky was blue above him, the sun was shining, and the air was very sweet.  He ran for a bit and then tumbled, and picked himself up again, and got a fresh impetus, and so on till he reached the door of the kitchen garden, which was open.  It was an old-fashioned kitchen garden with flowers in the borders.  There were single rose-colored tulips which had been in the garden as long as Miss Betty could remember, and they had been so increased by dividing the clumps that they now stretched in two rich lines of colour down both sides of the long walk.  And John Broom saw them.

“Pick the pretty flowers, love,” said he, in imitation of Thomasina’s patronising tone, and forthwith beginning at the end, he went steadily to the top of the right-hand border, mowing the rose-coloured tulips as he went.

Meanwhile, when Thomasina came to look for him he could not be found, and when all the back premises and the drying-ground had been searched in vain, she gave the alarm to the little ladies.