s too
independent and sensible to be counted a baby, and he was never fond of
being petted--and then, too, "Carrots" came so naturally!

I have said that Carrots loved his sister Floss better than anybody or
anything else in the world. I think one reason of this was that she was
the very first person he could remember in his life, and a happy thing
for him that it was so, for all about her that there was to remember was
nice and good and kind. She was four years older than he, four years
old, that is to say, when he first came into the world and looked about
him with grave inquiry as to what sort of a place this could be that he
had got to. And the first object that his baby-wise eyes settled upon
with content, as if in it there might be a possible answer to the
riddle, was Floss!

These children's father and mother were not very rich, and having six
boys and girls you can quite easily imagine they had plenty to do with
their money. Jack was a great boy at school when Carrots first joined
the family party, and Cecil and Louise had a governess. Mott learnt with
the governess too, but was always talking of the time when he should go
to school with Jack, for he was a very boy-ey boy, very much inclined to
look down upon girls in general, and his sisters in particular, and his
little sister Floss in _particularest_. So, till Carrots appeared on the
scene, Floss had had rather a lonely time of it, for, "of course," Cecil
and Louise, who had pockets in all their frocks, and could play the
'March of the Men of Harlech' as a duet on the piano, were _far_ too big
to be "friends to Floss," as she called it. They were friendly and kind
in an elder sisterly way, but that was quite a different sort of thing
from being "friends to her," though it never occurred to Floss to
grumble or to think, as so many little people think now-a-days, how
much better things would have been arranged if _she_ had had the
arranging of them.

There was only one thing Floss wished for very, very much, and that was
to have a brother or sister, she did not much care which, younger than
herself. She had the most motherly heart in the world, though she was
such a quiet little girl that very few people knew anything about what
she was thinking, and the big ones laughed at her for being so
outrageously fond of dolls. She had dolls of every kind and size, only
alike in one thing, that none of them were very pretty, or what you
would consider grand dolls. But