it didn't
matter how you dressed!"

Mrs. Trapp, though she might seem to talk at random, had a wifely
knack of dropping a shaft home. Her husband protested.

"Come, come, Maria--you know I'm not that sort of man!"

"How do I know what sort of man you are, under all that dirt?
For my part, if I'd been a magistrate, you shouldn't have walked off
with the boy till you'd washed yourself, not if you'd gone down on
your hands and knees for it; and him with his face shining all over
like a little Moses on the Mount, which does the lady credit if she's
the one you saw; though how they can dress children up like
pickle-herrings it beats me. Your bed's at the top of the house,
child, and there you'll find a suit o' clothes that I've washed and
aired after the last boy. I only hope you won't catch any of his
nasty tricks in 'em. Straight up the stairs and the little door to
the left at the top."

"Unless"--Mr. Trapp picked up courage for one more pleasantry--"you'd
like to make a start at once and go up by way of the chimbley."

He was rash. As a pugilist might eye a recovering opponent supposed
to be stunned, so Mrs. Trapp eyed Mr. Trapp.

"I thought I told you plain enough," she said, "that you're a
lowering man. What's worse, you're an unconverted one. Oh, you
nasty, fat, plain-featured fellow! Go indoors and wash yourself,
this instant!"

I spent close upon four years with this couple: and good parents they
were to me, as well as devoted to each other. Mrs. Trapp may have
been "cracked," as she certainly suffered from a determination of
words to the mouth: but, as a child will, I took her and the rest of
the world as I found them. She began to mother me at once; and on
the very next morning took my clothes in hand, snipped the ridiculous
tails off the jacket, and sent it, with the breeches, to the dyer's.
The yellow waistcoat she cut into pin-cushions, two for upstairs and
two for the parlour.

Having no children to save for, Mr. Trapp could afford to feed and
clothe an apprentice and take life easily to boot. Mrs. Trapp would
never allow him to climb a ladder; had even chained him to _terra
firma_ by a vow--since, as she explained to me once, "he's an
unconverted man. There's no harm in 'en; but I couldn't bear to have
him cut off in his sins. Besides, with such a figure, he'd scatter."

I recollect it as a foretaste of his kindness that on the first early
morning, as he led me forth to my first expe