She is twelve years old,
and has lots of hair, and eyes as large as oysters. I shall introduce
Johnny to-morrow, and hope to keep him melancholy all his holidays."
"Perhaps it will be for his good," said Faith, "because, without some
high ideas, he gets into such dreadful scrapes; and certainly it will be
for our good."
After making light of young love thus, these girls deserved the shafts
of Cupid, in addition to Captain Stubbard's shells. And it would have
been hard to find fairer marks when they came down dressed for dinner.
Mrs. Twemlow arrived with her daughter Eliza, but without her husband,
who was to fetch her in the evening; and Mrs. Stubbard came quite
alone, for her walkable children--as she called them--were all up at the
battery. "Can't smell powder too young in such days as these," was the
Captain's utterance; and, sure enough, they took to it, like sons of
guns.
"I should be so frightened," Mrs. Twemlow said, when Johnny (who sat at
the foot of the table representing his father most gallantly) had said
grace in Latin, to astonish their weak minds, "so nervous all the time,
so excessively anxious, the whole time that dreadful din was proceeding!
It is over now, thank goodness! But how can you have endured it, how
can you have gone about your household duties calmly, with seven of your
children--I think you said--going about in that fiery furnace?"
"Because, ma'am," replied Mrs.
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