say, she survived that dreadful
operation, and ultimately lived to an extreme old age!

"Only think," she was wont to say to Jemima Scrubbins, her bosom friend,
the monthly nurse who had attended Will's mother, and whose body was so
stiff, thin, and angular, that some of her most intimate friends thought
and said she must have been born in her skeleton alone--"Only think,
Jemimar, I give it as my morial opinion that that hinfant 'asn't larfed
once--no, not once--durin' the last three days, although I've chirruped
an' smiled an' made the most smudgin' faces to it, an' heaped all sorts
o' blandishments upon it till--. Oh! you can't imagine; but nothink's
of any use trying of w'en you can't do it; as my 'usband, as was in the
mutton-pie line, said to the doctor the night afore he died--my 'art is
quite broken about it, so it is."

To which Jemima was wont to reply, with much earnestness--for she was a
sympathetic soul, though stiff, thin, and angular--"You don't say so,
Maryhann! P'raps it's pains."

Whereupon Maryann would deny that pains had anything to do with it, and
Jemima would opine that it was, "koorious, to say the least of it."

No, as we have said, Baby Will would not laugh at everything. He
required to see something really worth laughing at before he would give
way, and when he did give way, his eyes invariably disappeared, for his
face was too fat to admit of eyes and mouth being open at the same time.
This was fortunate, for it prevented him for a little from seeing the
object that tickled his fancy, and so gave him time to breathe and
recruit for another burst. Had it been otherwise, he would certainly
have suffocated himself in infancy, and this, his veracious biography,
would have remained unwritten!

To creep about the house into dangerous and forbidden places, at the
risk of life and limb, was our hero's chief delight in early childhood.
To fall out of his cradle and crib, to tumble down stairs, and to bruise
his little body until it was black and blue, were among his most
ordinary experiences. Such mishaps never drew tears, however, from his
large blue eyes. After struggling violently to get over the rail of his
crib, and falling heavily on the floor, he was wont to rise with a gasp,
and gaze in bewilderment straight before him, as if he were
rediscovering the law of gravitation. No phrenologist ever conceived
half the number of bumps that were developed on his luckless cranium.

We make n