ring out into the moving darkness,
and wondering whether Alan would notice she was never on the river-boat
now; and the poor little General was filling the hot air with
expostulations, in the shape of loud roars, at the irregularities of
the treatment he was undergoing.

Esther had taken his day clothes off, and made a picture of him in
a cream flannel nightgown and a pink wool jacket. And for half an
hour, he had submitted good-temperedly to being handed about and
tickled and half-smothered with kisses. He had eyen permitted Nell to
bite his little pink toes severally, and say a surprising amount of
nonsense about little pigs that went to market and did similarly
absurd things.

He had hardly remonstrated when there had been a dispute about the
possession of his person, and Bunty had clung to his head and body
while Nell pulled vigorously at his legs.

But after a time, when Esther made him a little bed on one of the
seats and tried to lay him down upon it, a sense of his grievances
came over him.

He had a swinging cot at home; with little gold bars at the foot to
blink at--he could not see why he should be mulcted of it, and made to
put up with a rug three times doubled. He was accustomed, too, to a
shaded light, a quiet room, and a warning H'sh! h'sh! whenever
people forgot themselves sufficiently to make the slightest noise.

Here the great yellow light flared all the time, and every one of the
noisy creatures at whose hands he endured so much was within a few
feet of him.

So he lifted up his voice and wept. And when he found weeping did not
produce his gold-barred cot, and the little dangling tassels on the
mosquito nets, he raised his voice two notes, and when even there
Esther only went on patting his shoulder in a soothing way he burst
into roars absolutely deafening.

Nellie dangled all her long curls in his face to engage his
attention, but he clutched them viciously and pulled till the tears
came into her eyes. Esther and Meg sang lullabies till their tongues
ached, Judy tried walking him up and down the narrow space, but he
stiffened himself in her arms, and she was not strong enough to hold
him. Finally he dropped off into an exhausted sleep, drawing deep,
sobbing breaths and little hiccoughs of sorrow.

Then Bunty was discovered asleep on the floor with his head under a seat,
and had to be lifted into an easier position; and Baby, bolt upright
in a corner, was nodding like a little pink-