Blinks listened.
He closed his eyes, and listened again.
“That voice!” he cried, “them music!—it is—it is my ma.”
“My chee-ild! my chee-ild!” cried the fond parent; and Blinks, in the twinkling of—of—of a little star, was encircled by the hairy arms of his dear dam with a tit[4] in each hand, and one in his mouth.
Then, and not till then, did pretty Dick say, “Bravo! bravo!”
Mew IV.
Further Adventures of Blinks.
After the dreadful adventure related in chapter third, exhausted nature coveted nutrition; that is, Blinks felt thirsty, and for the suck-seeding [succeeding] sixty minutes, Blinks was busily engaged discussing a dinner of tit-bits. He wandered from one tit to another, and from the other tit to the next, and so on to the last, and then back again to the first.
Couldn’t he stick to one tit? “No, sirree!” Blinks would have replied, “the foremost tits contain butter, the next cream, the next sweet milk, and the last whey. My brethren and sistren should have got the whey—they should, but then my brethren were drowned in the sistren [cistern]—good joke, that, for a nine-days’ wonder. Eh?”
Having at length satisfied the cravings of nature, and filled his belly [Blinks fainted when he heard this expression, and on reviving bade me, try again], well, then having laid up a little store of the lacteal fluid, against further claims for sustenance, Blinks carefully put aside the skim-milk tit, as a thing all very good in its way, but which a hero 216 hours old, and with real eyes, ought to despise. He laid it past, and wheeling carefully round on one end, stood up, staggered for an instant, and finally reopened his new organs as wide as he could, and stared right in front of him, apparently with no very decided intention of what to do or how to do it. Just then there fell upon his listening ears—he had two, one for each eye, and was very proud of them too—a sound which made him start and turn red, so to speak, with indignation.