“I dare say.  I should not think she was a person to take liberties with; but she was very sweet and kind to me.”

“You are not a person to take liberties with anybody, nor to have any taken with you; and so I dare say she recognized a kindred spirit.”

“Now, Julia, by your paying me such a compliment as that, I am certain you must want to have your bonnet taken up stairs for you; and so you shall.”

“Ah! now I shall always know what string to pull when I wish to put a skilful attendant in motion.  Phil would take my bonnet up stairs for me in a moment, if I bade him; but when I went up myself after it, it would be sure to stare me in the face, topsy-turvy, dumped bolt upright on the feather.”

CHAPTER VI.

In another fortnight we had another Physick in the family.  His papa called him “a little dose,” and his mamma a “pill,” in contradistinction to her previous “Phil.”  Proving peaceful and reflective, he also soon earned for himself the title of “the infant Philosopher.”

Mrs. Physick did not like the society of Mrs. Rocket, the nurse, whom the Doctor had chosen “on account of the absence of her conversational powers.”  Mrs. Physick was accordingly always trying to get me into her chamber to sit with her.  Mrs. Rocket accordingly did not like me, and was always trying to get me out.  Between these two contending powers above, and the butcher, the baker, and candlestick-maker below, I was neither solitary nor idle.

There was much to do, moreover, in answering the kind inquiries, and receiving and disposing of the whips, jellies, blanc-mangers, and other indigestible delicacies, sent in by anxious friends.  These the grateful Doctor pronounced, in the privacy of domestic life, “poison for the patient, but not quite so bad for the attendants.”  Accordingly, we ate them together sociably, at almost every meal; after which we went up stairs and told “the patient” how good they were, while I presented her gruel, and he would ask her, with an earnest air of judicial and dispassionate investigation, whether that was not “nice.”  This conduct she declared most unfeeling and ungrateful in us both, and bound herself by many a vow to make us pay for it as soon as she had the ordering of our dinners again.  So we all made merry together over the little cradle that was called “the pill-box.”  Its small tenant was from the first, as I have hinted, a virtuous child, cried little, slept much, and when awake rewarded our attentions by making such preposterous faces as rendered it a most grateful task to watch him.  I soon, therefore, became much attached to him; and I enjoyed one at least of the chief elements of the happiness of the individual,—­the happiness of those among whom the individual lives.

In the mean time my guardian sometimes discussed with me some other things besides the jellies.  For instance, “Katy,” said he at one of our tete-a-tete dinners, “you walk out every day, I suppose; or, at least, you ought.  I wish you would call now and then, and take Nelly Fader with you.  She can hardly be a very entertaining companion to you, I own, but it would be a charity; and, for your mother’s daughter, that’s enough.”