For his impudence he had a box on the ear: “Pooh! It went pop like a foxglove,” he laughed.
At Brighton he was taken over the Pavilion, and it was some trouble to explain to him that this fine house had been built for a gentleman called a king. By-and-by, in the top stories, rather musty from old carpets and hangings: “Hum!” said he; “seems stuffy. I can smell that gentleman’s dinner,” i.e. George the Fourth’s.
Visiting a trim suburban villa, while the ladies talked they sent him out on the close-mown lawn to play. When he came in, “Well, dear, did you enjoy yourself?”
“Don’t think much of your garden,” said Bevis; “no buttercups.”
At prayers: “Make Bobby a good boy, and see that you do everything I tell you.”
“You longered your promise,” did not fulfil it for a long time. “Straight yourselves,” when out walking he wished them to go straight on and not turn. “Round yourselves, round yourselves,” when he wanted them to take a turning. When he grew up to be a big man he expressed his determination to “knock down the policeman and kill the hanging-man,” then he could do as he liked. “Tiffeck” was the cat’s cough.
Driving over Westminster Bridge the first time, and seeing the Houses of Parliament, which reminded him of his toy bricks, he inquired “If there was anything inside?” Older people have asked that of late years. As he did not get his wishes quickly, it appeared to him there were “too many perhapses in this place:” he wanted things done “punctually at now.” A waterfall was the “tumbling water.”
They told him there was one part of us that did not die. “Then,” he said directly, “I suppose that is the thinking part.” What more, O! Descartes, Plato, philosophers, is there in your tomes? The crucifixion hurt his feelings very much, the cruel nails, the unfeeling spear: he looked at the picture a long time, and then turned over the page, saying, “If God had been there He would not have let them do it.”
“What are you going to be when you’re a man?” asked grandpa. “An engineer, a lawyer?”
“Pooh! I’m going to be a king, and wear a gold crown!”