ng impression was made on me by Mrs. Waddy's saying,
'Here, Master Harry, your own papa will come for you; and you may be
sure he will, for I have his word he will, and he's not one to break
it, unless his country's against him; and for his darling boy he'd march
against cannons. So here you'll sit and wait for him, won't you?' I sat
down immediately, looking up. Mrs. Waddy and Mrs. Thresher raised their
hands. I had given them some extraordinary proof of my love for my
father. The impression I received was, that sitting was the thing to
conjure him to me.

'Where his heart's not concerned,' Mrs. Waddy remarked of me
flatteringly, 'he's shrewd as a little schoolmaster.'

'He've a bird's-nesting eye,' said Mrs. Thresher, whose face I was
studying.

John Thresher wagered I would be a man before either of them reached
that goal. But whenever he spoke he suffered correction on account of
his English.

'More than his eating and his drinking, that child's father worrits
about his learning to speak the language of a British gentleman,' Mrs.
Waddy exclaimed. 'Before that child your h's must be like the panting of
an engine--to please his father. He 'd stop me carrying the dinner-tray
on meat-dish hot, and I'm to repeat what I said, to make sure the child
haven't heard anything ungrammatical. The child's nursemaid he'd lecture
so, the poor girl would come down to me ready to bend double, like a
bundle of nothing, his observations so took the pride out of her. That's
because he 's a father who knows his duty to the child:--"Child!" says
he, "man, ma'am." It's just as you, John, when you sow your seed you
think of your harvest. So don't take it ill of me, John; I beg of you be
careful of your English. Turn it over as you're about to speak.'

'Change loads on the road, you mean,' said John Thresher. 'Na, na, he's
come to settle nigh a weedy field, if you like, but his crop ain't nigh
reaping yet. Hark you, Mary Waddy, who're a widde, which 's as much as
say, an unocc'pied mind, there's cockney, and there's country, and there
's school. Mix the three, strain, and throw away the sediment. Now, yon
's my view.

His wife and Mrs. Waddy said reflectively, in a breath, 'True!'

'Drink or no, that's the trick o' brewery,' he added.

They assented. They began praising him, too, like meek creatures.

'What John says is worth listening to, Mary. You may be over-careful. A
stew's a stew, and not a boiling to shreds, and you want a s