and good one. Life
was a picture painted in low, cool tones, but in perfect keeping; and
though another and brighter style might have pleased better, she did not
quarrel with this.

Into this steady, decorous, highly-respectable circle the youngest
child, James, made a formidable irruption. One sometimes sees launched
into a family-circle a child of so different a nature from all the rest,
that it might seem as if, like an aerolite, he had fallen out of another
sphere. All the other babies of the Marvyn family had been of that
orderly, contented sort who sleep till it is convenient to take them up,
and while awake suck their thumbs contentedly and look up with large,
round eyes at the ceiling when it is not convenient for their elders
and betters that they should do anything else. In farther advanced
childhood, they had been quiet and decorous children, who could be all
dressed and set up in chairs, like so many dolls, of a Sunday morning,
patiently awaiting the stroke of the church-bell to be carried out and
put into the wagon which took them over the two-miles' road to church.
Possessed of such tranquil, orderly, and exemplary young offshoots, Mrs.
Marvyn had been considered eminent for her "faculty" in bringing up
children.

But James was destined to put "faculty," and every other talent which
his mother possessed, to rout. He was an infant of moods and tenses, and
those not of any regular verb. He would cry of nights, and he would be
taken up of mornings, and he would not suck his thumb, nor a bundle of
caraway-seed tied in a rag and dipped in sweet milk, with which the good
gossips in vain endeavored to pacify him. He fought manfully with his
two great fat fists the battle of babyhood, utterly reversed all nursery
maxims, and reigned as baby over the whole prostrate household. When old
enough to run alone, his splendid black eyes and glossy rings of hair
were seen flashing and bobbing in every forbidden place and occupation.
Now trailing on his mother's gown, he assisted her in salting her butter
by throwing in small contributions of snuff or sugar, as the case might
be; and again, after one of those mysterious periods of silence which
are of most ominous significance in nursery experience, he would rise
from the demolition of her indigo-bag, showing a face ghastly with blue
streaks, and looking more like a gnome than the son of a respectable
mother. There was not a pitcher of any description of contents left
wi