Mr. Bangs, in due time, was asked up to Fanny’s room, into which he walked on tiptoe, giggling. But when he got a glimpse of the baby, his cheek was flushed, and his lip quivered. It seemed as if all the feelings of a father had been pent up till that moment; for when the nurse put the little boy in his arms, he tenderly kissed it, and, “lifting up his face, he wept aloud.”
Mr. Floss was kneeling by his wife, and blessing her every moment between his grateful prayers; this sudden burst therefore of the old man was not surprising, but it was to his wife. As to Hannah French, she laughed so loud at the oddity of it, that Mrs. Bangs fearing that their hubbub would be injurious to her daughter, made them both go out of the room; but Hannah French laughed by snatches for the remainder of the day.
“Adieu to business and to clubs now. The boy has been so long coming,” said he to his wife, “and no thanks to you, that I shall make myself amends for my thirteen disappointments, and having to wait seven years too, in the bargain.”
So he staid nearly all the time in the nursery, and waited for the development of growth and intellect with the most intense and feverish anxiety. Every day he pulled the little fellow’s mouth open to look for a tooth, and when it came at last, which it did at the end of six months, he tore himself from the pleasure of looking at it, to rush out among his old friends to make them as happy as himself.
The first that he saw was one of his club companions, for he consorted with no others. This person was just coming up the street from the river.
“Good morning, neighbour Bangs,” said he, “have you seen the steamboat Sea Serpent? She has just come in—twenty miles in one hour!”
“My Christopher has a tooth,” roared Mr. Bangs, for his old friend was a little deaf.
“She is expected to go even faster when her boiler is a little larger,” said the club man, Peter Broo, by name.
“You never saw a finer tooth. It is a thundering large one. He bit my little finger—here, just put your thumb in my mouth, and I’ll show you how the little rogue tried to bite.”
“Yes; but you had better take a look at the boat, for it will be off again in an hour.”