in the street. He listened, and even he was satisfied.
“Thank Heaven!” he says, and down he plumped in the easy-chair by the fireplace. “You know, I never thought of that,” he goes on. “He’s been shut up in that basket for over an hour, and if by any chance he’d managed to get his head entangled in the clothes—I’ll never do such a fool’s trick again!”
“You’re fond of it?” I says.
He looked round at me. “Fond of it,” he repeats. “Why, I’m his father.” And then he begins to laugh again.
“Oh!” I says. “Then I presume I have the pleasure of addressing Mr. Coster King?”
“Coster King?” he answers in surprise. “My name’s Milberry.”
I says: “The father of this child, according
to the label inside the cover, is Coster King out of Starlight, his mother being Jenny Deans out of Darby the Devil.”
He looks at me in a nervous fashion, and puts the chair between us. It was evidently his turn to think as how I was mad. Satisfying himself, I suppose, that at all events I wasn’t dangerous, he crept closer till he could get a look inside the basket. I never heard a man give such an unearthly yell in all my life. He stood on one side of the bed and I on the other. The dog, awakened by the noise, sat up and grinned, first at one of us and then at the other. I took it to be a bull-pup of about nine months old, and a fine specimen for its age.
“My child!” he shrieks, with his eyes starting out of his head, “That thing