nd ensemble-pieces, our
ritardandos and prestissimos, producing unexpected effects, and with
the limited means at our disposal, making what I recollect as a very
attractive and interesting performance. Edifying as it should have been
to a parent, my mother could at first not see it in that light, but she
had finally to give in, and to acknowledge that it was a bad cough that
whooped no good.

I was an only son--an elder brother died some years before I was
born--and it was but natural that my mother should look with indulgence
on my delinquencies. I must sometimes have tried her and those around me
sorely, as, for instance, when I hanged my little sister's favourite
doll Anna Maria, from a knob of the chest of drawers, there to remain
until she be dead.

Clara--that was my sister's name--was of a warm temperament, and fought
for the release of her wax baby with all the passionate energy of the
maternal instinct. I had to give way and cut down the victim, and then,
all other means to pacify her having failed, I appealed to her
imagination, and persuaded her to play at my having killed her in the
battle we had just fought; it would be such a surprise for mamma. Ever
sharp and quick as she was, she at once saw the far-reaching
possibilities of my scheme, and allowed herself to be wrapped up in a
bedsheet, as in a shroud, and to be laid out stiff and rigid as a
corpse. I pulled down the blinds and shut the shutters; then I lit a
candle which I placed by her side; when all was ready, I hid in a
cupboard and set up a dismal wail that soon brought my mother to the
spot. The effect upon her was all I could have desired, perhaps more
so, for the first surprise once over, she expressed her disapproval of
my conduct in terms suitable to the occasion, and thus quite spoilt the
pleasure I had taken in the whole thing.

My mother was a remarkable woman,--a "lovely" woman, to use the word as
the Americans do when they want a single epithet to describe alike the
beauty of the body and the beauty of the soul, a word that shall tell of
the brightness of the intellect and suggest the qualities of the heart.

There are those who think that when it comes to the selection of
epithets applicable to a mother, however distinguished or worthy she may
have been, the son is not the person to entrust with that selection.
Perhaps they are right, and if in this case they care to do so, they
must look round for corroborative evidence in her books.