There was one outcry from mother, wife, and boys, “Not without you?”

“I can’t go till Drew comes back from his outing-—”

“But why should we?  It would be so much nicer all together.”

“It will be horribly dull without; indeed I never can see the sense of going at all,” said Janet.

There was a confused outcry of indignation, in which waves-—crabs-— boats and shrimps, were all mingled together,

“I’m sure that’s not half so entertaining as hearing people talk in the evening,” said Janet.

“You precocious little piece of dissipation,” said her mother, laughing.

“I didn’t mean fine lady nonsense,” said Janet, rather hotly; “I meant talk like-—”

“Like big guns.  Oh, yes, we know,” interrupted Allen; “Janet does not think anyone worth listening to that hasn’t got a whole alphabet tacked behind his name.”

“Janet had better take care, and Bobus too,” said the Doctor, “or we shall have to send them to vegetate on some farm, and see the cows milked and the pigs fed.”

“I’m afraid Bobus would apply himself to finding how much caseine matter was in the cow’s milk,” said Janet in her womanly tone.

“Or by what rule the pigs curled their tails,” said her father, with a mischievous pull at the black plaited tail that hung down behind her.

And then they all rose from the table, little Barbara starting up as soon as grace was said.  “Father, please, you are the Giant Queen Mab always rides!”

“Queen Mab, or Queen Bab, always rides me, which comes to the same thing.  Though as to the size of the Giant-—”

There was a pause to let grandmamma go up in peace, upon Mother Carey’s arm, and then a general romp and scurry all the way up the stairs, ending by Jock’s standing on one leg on the top post of the baluster, like an acrobat, an achievement which made even his father so giddy that he peremptorily desired it never to be attempted again, to the great relief of both the ladies.  Then, coming into the drawing-room, Babie perched herself on his knee, and began, without the slightest preparation, the recitation of Cowper’s “Colubriad":—-

“Fast by the threshold of a door nailed fast
Three kittens sat, each kitten looked aghast.”

And just as she had with great excitement—­

“Taught him never to come there no more,”

Armine broke in with “Nine times one are nine.”

It was an institution dating from the days when Janet made her first acquaintance with the “Little Busy Bee,” that there should be something, of some sort, said or shown to papa, whenever he was at home or free between dinner and bed-time, and it was considered something between a disgrace and a misfortune to produce nothing.

So when the two little ones had been kissed and sent off to bed, with mamma going with them to hear their prayers, Jock, on being called for, repeated a Greek declension with two mistakes in it, Bobus showed a long sum in decimals, Janet, brought a neat parallelism of the present tense of the verb “to be” in five languages-—Greek, Latin, French, German, and English.