ith a wondering fondness, and
when she stooped down, and stretched her jewelled arms towards him, he
stretched his little hands up, and how they touched the other children
did not know; but, saying, "Come and give me a kiss, my darling," she
raised him, and he seemed to ascend in her small fingers as lightly as
a feather, and she held him in her lap and covered him with kisses.

Nothing daunted, the other children would have been only too happy to
change places with their favoured little brother. There was only one
thing that was unpleasant, and a little frightened them, and that was
the black woman, who stood and stretched forward, in the carriage as
before. She gathered a rich silk and gold handkerchief that was in her
fingers up to her lips, and seemed to thrust ever so much of it, fold
after fold, into her capacious mouth, as they thought to smother her
laughter, with which she seemed convulsed, for she was shaking and
quivering, as it seemed, with suppressed merriment; but her eyes,
which remained uncovered, looked angrier than they had ever seen eyes
look before.

But the lady was so beautiful they looked on her instead, and she
continued to caress and kiss the little boy on her knee; and smiling
at the other children she held up a large russet apple in her fingers,
and the carriage began to move slowly on, and with a nod inviting them
to take the fruit, she dropped it on the road from the window; it
rolled some way beside the wheels, they following, and then she
dropped another, and then another, and so on. And the same thing
happened to all; for just as either of the children who ran beside had
caught the rolling apple, somehow it slipt into a hole or ran into a
ditch, and looking up they saw the lady drop another from the window,
and so the chase was taken up and continued till they got, hardly
knowing how far they had gone, to the old cross-road that leads to
Owney. It seemed that there the horses' hoofs and carriage wheels
rolled up a wonderful dust, which being caught in one of those eddies
that whirl the dust up into a column, on the calmest day, enveloped
the children for a moment, and passed whirling on towards Lisnavoura,
the carriage, as they fancied, driving in the centre of it; but
suddenly it subsided, the straws and leaves floated to the ground, the
dust dissipated itself, but the white horses and the lackeys, the
gilded carriage, the lady and their little golden-haired brother were
gone.

At th