respect for the person laughed at.  Heavens! the thought was unendurable!  At any rate, I must write an early apology.  When I was correspondent for the house with which I am now salesman I reclaimed many an old customer who had wandered off—­certainly I might hope by a well-written letter to regain in Miss Mayton’s respect whatever position I had lost.  I hastily drafted a letter, corrected it carefully, copied it in due form, and forwarded it by the faithful Michael.  Then I tried to read, but without the least success.  For hours I paced the piazza and consumed cigars; when at last I retired it was with many ideas, hopes, fears, and fancies which had never before been mine.  True to my trust, I looked into my nephews’ room; there lay the boys, in postures more graceful than any which brush or chisel have ever reproduced.  Toddie, in particular, wore so lovely an expression that I could not refrain from kissing him.  But I was none the less careful to make use of my new key, and to lock my other door also.

The next day was the Sabbath.  Believing fully in the binding force and worldly wisdom of the Fourth Commandment, so far as it refers to rest, I have conscientiously trained myself to sleep two hours later on the morning of the holy day than I ever allowed myself to do on business days.  But having inherited, besides a New England conscience, a New England abhorrence of waste, I regularly sit up two hours later on Saturday nights than on any others; and the night preceding this particular Sabbath was no exception to the rule, as the reader may imagine from the foregoing recital.  At about 5.30 A. M., however, I became conscious that my nephews were not in accord, with me on the Sinaitic law.  They were not only awake, but were disputing vigorously, and, seemingly, very loudly, for I heard their words very distinctly.  With sleepy condescension I endeavored to ignore these noisy irreverents, but I was suddenly moved to a belief in the doctrine of vicarious atonement, for a flying body, with more momentum than weight, struck me upon the not prominent bridge of my nose, and speedily and with unnecessary force accommodated itself to the outline of my eyes.  After a moment spent in anguish, and in wondering how the missive came through closed doors and windows, I discovered that my pain had been caused by one of the dolls, which, from its extreme uncleanness, I suspected belonged to Toddie; I also discovered that the door between the rooms was open.

“Who threw that doll?” I shouted, sternly.  There came no response.

“Do you hear?” I roared.

“What is it, Uncle Harry?” asked Budge, with most exquisitely polite inflection.

“Who threw that doll?”

“Huh?”

“I say, who threw that doll?”

“Why, nobody did it.”

“Toddie, who threw that doll?”

“Budge did,” replied Toddie in muffled tones, suggestive of a brotherly hand laid forcibly over a pair of small lips.