g a cracker. Burn your little fingers, children! Blaze out little
kindly flames from each other's eyes! And then draw close together and
read the motto (that old namby-pamby motto, so stale and so new!)--I
say, let her lips read it, and his construe it; and so divide the
sweetmeat, young people, and crunch it between you. I have no teeth.
Bitter almonds and sugar disagree with me, I tell you; but, for all
that, shall not bonbons melt in the mouth?

We follow John upstairs to the General's apartments, and enter with Mr.
George Esmond Warrington, who makes a prodigious fine bow. There is
only one lady in the room, seated near a window: there is not often much
sunshine in Dean Street: the young lady in the window is no especial
beauty: but it is spring-time, and she is blooming vernally. A bunch
of fresh roses is flushing in her honest cheek. I suppose her eyes are
violets. If we lived a hundred years ago, and wrote in the Gentleman's
or the London Magazine, we should tell Mr. Sylvanus Urban that her neck
was the lily, and her shape the nymph's: we should write an acrostic
about her, and celebrate our Lambertella in an elegant poem, still to be
read between a neat new engraved plan of the city of Prague and the King
of Prussia's camp, and a map of Maryland and the Delaware counties.

Here is Miss Theo blushing like a rose. What could mamma have meant an
hour since by insisting that she was very pale and tired, and had best
not come out to-day with the rest of the party? They were gone to pay
their compliments to my Lord Wrotham's ladies, and thank them for the
house in their absence; and papa was at the Horse Guards. He is in great
spirits. I believe he expects some command, though mamma is in a sad
tremor lest he should again be ordered abroad.

"Your brother and mine are gone to see our little brother at his school
at the Chartreux. My brothers are both to be clergymen, I think," Miss
Theo continues. She is assiduously hemming at some article of boyish
wearing apparel as she talks. A hundred years ago, young ladies were not
afraid either to make shirts, or to name them. Mind, I don't say they
were the worse or the better for that plain stitching or plain speaking:
and have not the least desire, my dear young lady, that you should make
puddings or I should black boots.

So Harry has been with them? "He often comes, almost every day," Theo
says, looking up in George's face. "Poor fellow! He likes us better than
the fine