Is there only one Jamie here? Can one little urchin about as high as the
table so fill a house with mirth and mischief, so daguerrotype himself
in every corner, possess, while claiming nothing, so large a share of
the household interest? For he somehow bubbles up everywhere. Not a
mischance or a misplacement but can pretty surely be brought home to
him. Is a glass broken? Jamie broke it. Is a door open that ought to be
shut? Jamie opened it. Or shut that ought to be open? Jamie shut it. Is
there a mighty crash in the entry? It is Jamie dropping the crowbar
through the side-lights. The "Atlantic" has been missing all the
morning.

"Jamie,"--a last, random resort, after fruitless search,--"where is the
'Atlantic Monthly'?"

"In daw."

"In the drawer? No, it is not in the drawer. You don't know anything
about it."

Not quite so fast. Jamie knows the "Atlantic Monthly" as well as you;
and if you will open the drawer for him, he will rapidly scatter its
contents till he comes to the missing "Monthly," safe under the shawls
where he deposited it.

If you are hanging your room with ground-pine, he lays hold of every
stray twig, and tucks it into every crack he can reach. Will you have
some corn out of the barrel? It is Jamie for balancing himself on the
edge, and reaching down into the depths after it, till little more than
his heels are visible. If, in a sudden exuberance, you make a
"cheese,"--not culinary, but _whirligig_--round go his little bobtail
petticoats in fatuous imitation. You walk the floor awhile, lost in day
dreaming, to find this little monkey trotting behind you with droll
gravity, his hands clasped behind his head, like yours; and he breaks in
upon your most serious meditations with, "Baddy get down on floor, want
wide on Baddy back," as nonchalantly as if he were asking you to pass
the salt. All that he says, all that he does, has its peculiar charm.
Not that he is in the least a remarkable child.

"I trust we have within our realme
Five [thousand] as good as hee."

Otherwise what will befall this sketch?

I do not expect anything will ever come of him. In a few years he will
be just like everybody else; but now he is the _peculiar_ gift of
Heaven. Men and women walk and talk all day long, and nobody minds them;
while this little ignoramus seldom opens his lips but you think nothing
was ever so winsomely spoken. I suspect it is only his complete
simplicity and sincerity. What he say