ncle."

"What! uncle Sneezum?" and a wonderful light seemed to break in upon my
mind.--"He sent this baby here?"

Mr Morgan nodded his head; and, being a man of great caution, he only
put his finger in a mysterious manner alongside of his nose, and said--

"Secrets in all families, Sneezum."

"Oho! well--but the women--they're ugly customers, both of them; uncle
Sneezum was no judge of beauty."

"The women! what do you mean?" said Mr Morgan.

"Ay, which of them is it? but you need hardly tell, for I should never
know which of them you meant; they're a great deal liker each other than
any two peas _I_ ever saw. Are we to call her Mrs Sneezum?"

Here Mr Morgan burst into a great laugh.

"My dear Sneezum, you are always trying to find out some wonderful scene
or other to put into one of your books. No, no--these are two nurses;
one will remain in charge of the child, the other returns immediately to
Calcutta."

"And where will the one that is to remain--where will she live?" I asked
with a fearful presentiment of something shockingly unpleasant. But
before he had time to answer, the black visage of the nurse herself
appeared at the door, smiling with more blindingly white teeth than
ever.

"We have took dee room below dis--dee babb is in dee beautiful bed, and
ve vill never leave Massa Sib--never no more--so nice!"

So I was booked, and felt it useless to complain.

CHAPTER II.

Fifteen years passed on most happily. I established myself, or rather
old Morgan established me, in my present house; he paid L25,000 for the
estate; and I have gone on, as I told you at the beginning of this
letter, cultivating my farm and my talents with the utmost care. The
little girl grew and grew till I thought she would never stop; and by
the time she was sixteen she was at least an inch taller than I was.
Many people like those prodigious women of five feet six--I'm only five
feet five myself, which I believe was the exact measurement of Napoleon;
and I must confess that when I looked on Martha Brown--that was her
name--a sort of compliment I always thought to the complexion of her
Hindoo mother--I could not imagine how she could be the child of such a
curious old-fashioned looking individual as I had heard my uncle Sneezum
was. Well, she grew tall--and grew stout--and grew clever; and if old
Morgan had been her father himself, he could not have taken more care of
her. He was always down at Goslingbury, (that's the name of