"What are you going to do, Dolly?"
"I shall take two Seidlitz powders with sugar, you know. They are so nice, and nurse says they make me thinner. I am never able to take them when papa is at home, because they make me look pale."
"Bravo, Dolly!" cries Jack, "happy the mind that a little contents. Well, girls, you shall have a fine dish of blackbirds for supper, and Nell's treacle tarts, if they are eatable."
"Will you?" cries a terrible voice behind us, that galvanizes our recumbent forms into most intense and rigid uprightness, while every soft hair on our miserable young heads stands on end with freezing, curdling horror. "Will you, I'll teach you, miss (with a fierce nod at Alice's pretty trembling figure), to go gallivanting off to Pimpernel, to simper at a low photographer, you miserable, doll-faced, conceited puppet; (to Jack): I'll teach you, sir, to use my guns, and bring me in a doctor's bill a yard long for mending your wretched bones: (to me): I'll teach you, you object, to waste my substance with your filthy treacle tarts; and you, sir (to Alan), to maul over my books; while as to you (to Dolly), although I can't offer you Seidlitz powders, perhaps brimstone and treacle will do as well, oo—oo—oo—ooh! You deceitful, vagabond, shameless pack, get out of my sight; go!"
He need not tell us that twice, away we flee, every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost; along the passage, up the stairs, in at the nursery, to which we always go on these occasions, for mother is usually there. At our heels comes the governor, and a lively time follows; we become a prose version of that deplorable story of ten little niggers, which we all know; as rapidly as they dropped off, so do we this one for a cane, that for a bible, another into space with boxed ears, until, from beginning with a goodly number, we end a forlorn remnant. Over and above our other punishments, we are one and all sent to bed, and
