“Then we’ll—go too. I say, mother, one season in town, would not be amiss for Nanny; and so we can take her there next winter; and then I may swim and soar in celestial sounds every evening!”
“Papa, now you are too provoking, and I am jealous,” said Nanny. “For my part, I don’t like music any more than I do any other sort of racket. And I do think if there is one nuisance worse than another, it is a singing and playing lunatic, filling the whole room full of shrieks and crashes, just as if a thousand housemaids were smashing a million of dishes, and squalling together over the catastrophe!”
“Oh, child, child, what a misfortune for you to have been born deaf, as to your divine ears!” answered the old gentleman in tones of deep and sincere pity and regret.
“I’m sure, papa, I often wish I had been born deaf as to my bodily ears! I mean, when your divinity is shrieking and thrashing, and raising such a hullabaloo that I can’t hear myself speak!” said Nanny.
“Ah! ‘that accounts for the milk in the cocoanut!’ You can’t hear yourself speak, and you prefer the sound of your own sweet voice to the music of the spheres!”
“If the music of the spheres is that sort of noise, I certainly do, papa.”
“Thank Goodness, here we are at our own gate! And now we will drop the subject of music for the rest of the evening—Kitty, was the missing turkey-gobbler found?” inquired Mrs. Seymour of the girl who came to open the door.
“Yes’m.”
“And did the maids finish their task of carding?”
“Yes’m.”