ions and prepared me
for the responses, but the effect was striking, both upon his visitors
and the landlady's. Gradually my ear grew accustomed to her invariable
whisper on these occasions. 'Blood Rile,' she said; and her friends all
said 'No!' like the run of a finger down a fiddlestring.

A gentleman of his acquaintance called on him one evening to take him out
for a walk. My father happened to be playing with me when this gentleman
entered our room: and he jumped up from his hands and knees, and abused
him for intruding on his privacy, but afterwards he introduced him to me
as Shylock's great-great-great-grandson, and said that Shylock was
satisfied with a pound, and his descendant wanted two hundred pounds, or
else all his body: and this, he said, came of the emigration of the
family from Venice to England. My father only seemed angry, for he went
off with Shylock's very great grandson arm-in-arm, exclaiming, 'To the
Rialto!' When I told Mrs. Waddy about the visitor, she said, 'Oh, dear!
oh, dear! then I'm afraid your sweet papa won't return very soon, my
pretty pet.' We waited a number of days, until Mrs. Waddy received a
letter from him. She came full-dressed into my room, requesting me to
give her twenty kisses for papa, and I looked on while she arranged her
blue bonnet at the glass. The bonnet would not fix in its place. At last
she sank down crying in a chair, and was all brown silk, and said that
how to appear before a parcel of dreadful men, and perhaps a live duke
into the bargain, was more than she knew, and more than could be expected
of a lone widow woman. 'Not for worlds!' she answered my petition to
accompany her. She would not, she said, have me go to my papa there for
anything on earth; my papa would perish at the sight of me; I was not
even to wish to go. And then she exclaimed, 'Oh, the blessed child's poor
papa!' and that people were cruel to him, and would never take into
account his lovely temper, and that everybody was his enemy, when he
ought to be sitting with the highest in the land. I had realized the
extremity of my forlorn state on a Sunday that passed empty of my father,
which felt like his having gone for ever. My nursemaid came in to assist
in settling Mrs. Waddy's bonnet above the six crisp curls, and while they
were about it I sat quiet, plucking now and then at the brown silk,
partly to beg to go with it, partly in jealousy and love at the thought
of its seeing him from whom I was s