“Doesn’t she talk of other children?” asked the Judge.
“O, bless you, yes, sir, an’ she also talks to tables, an’ chairs, an’ carpets, an’ that ghost mouse. She do have a name for everything in her room, an’ you’d think she had a whole menagerie to hear her growl an’ bark.”
“Must be the spotted dog,” said the Judge to himself with a smile, and he again took up his magazine.
Mrs. Blodgett waddled away. “Sure an’ it’s a wonderful thing how at his age he do take on the ways of a family man. He ought to ’a’ had a dozen children.”
The Judge was instinctively a model person at managing children. To begin with, he loved them; and to end with, he did not fuss over them. Just now he was becoming intensely uncomfortable on account of this solid little lump against his slightly rheumatic knee. If he took her up and laid her on the sofa he might wake her, so he gave her a cautious little push. She gently rolled over. He guided her head and assisted the indignant pigeon to fly away. Now Bethany was comfortably stretched on the floor sleeping soundly, her pretty mouth wide open, after the fashion of civilized children.
The Judge had heard of Indian mothers closing the mouths of their babes, so he bent over and gently brought the child’s lips together. To his delight they stayed closed, and with a sigh of relief he stretched out his long legs, took up his magazine, and looked enjoyably about him before he went on with his reading.
He was intensely fond of his books; indeed, reading was almost a passion with him, and the evening hours were the pleasantest part of the day.
Work was over, the children were safely in the house—for since Titus’s accident he always had a little anxiety about boys and girls absent from their own rooftrees—and he was free to amuse himself in this most delightful of ways.
Alas for the Judge! He had not read five sentences when he heard a shrill, insistent voice, not in this upper hall, but in the one below, away down by the front door.
“I tell you I must see the Jedge. I hevn’t got no message.”