Читать книгу House and Home Papers онлайн

5 страница из 63

When children began to make their appearance in our establishment, my wife, like a well-conducted housekeeper, had the best of nursery-arrangements,—a room all warmed, lighted, and ventilated, and abounding in every proper resource of amusement to the rising race; but it was astonishing to see how, notwithstanding this, the centripetal attraction drew every pair of little pattering feet to our parlor.

“My dear, why don’t you take your blocks up-stairs?”

“I want to be where oo are,” said with a piteous under-lip, was generally a most convincing answer.

Then the small people could not be disabused of the idea that certain chief treasures of their own would be safer under papa’s writing-table or mamma’s sofa than in the safest closet of their own domains. My writing-table was dock-yard for Arthur’s new ship, and stable for little Tom’s pepper-and-salt-colored pony, and carriage-house for Charley’s new wagon, while whole armies of paper-dolls kept house in the recess behind mamma’s sofa.

And then, in due time, came the tribe of pets who followed the little ones and rejoiced in the blaze of the firelight. The boys had a splendid Newfoundland, which, knowing our weakness, we warned them with awful gravity was never to be a parlor dog; but, somehow, what with little beggings and pleadings on the part of Arthur and Tom, and the piteous melancholy with which Rover would look through the window-panes, when shut out from the blazing warmth into the dark, cold, veranda, it at last came to pass that Rover gained a regular corner at the hearth, a regular status in every family-convocation. And then came a little black-and-tan English terrier for the girls; and then a fleecy poodle, who established himself on the corner of my wife’s sofa; and for each of these some little voices pleaded, and some little heart would be so near broken at any slight, that my wife and I resigned ourselves to live in menagerie, the more so as we were obliged to confess a lurking weakness towards these four-footed children ourselves.