Paste Jewels

“No, ’twasn’t a haxident,” said Jennie.  “’E done it a-purpice.”

“Well, wot if hi did?” retorted Harry.  “Didn’t yer pull the tile off me rockin’-’orse?”

“Well, never mind,” said Bradley, seeing how strained things were getting.  “Don’t quarrel about it now.  It’s all done and gone, and I dare say you were both a little to blame.”

“’Hi war’n’t!” said Harry, and then the subject was dropped.  The children romped in and out through the library and halls for some time, and the Bradleys and Perkinses compared notes on various points of interest to both.  After a while they again reverted to the subject of their children.

“Does Harry go to school?” asked Bessie.

“No, we think he’s too young yet,” returned Mrs. Bradley.  “He learns a little of something every day from Harriet, who is really a very superior girl.  She is a good servant.  She hasn’t been in this country very long, and is English to the core, as you’ve probably noticed, not only in her way of comporting herself, but in her accent.”

“Yes, I’ve observed it,” said Bessie.  “What does she teach him?”

“Oh, she tells him stories that are more or less instructive, and she reads to him.  She’s taught him one or two pretty little songs—ballads, you know—too.  Harry has a sweet little voice.  Harry, dear, won’t you sing that song about Mrs. Henry Hawkins for mamma?”

“Don’t warn’ter,” said Harry.  “Hi’m sick o’ that bloomin’ old song.”

“Seems to me I’ve heard it,” said Thaddeus.  “As I remember it, Harry, it was very pretty.”

“It is,” said Bradley.  “It’s the one you mean—‘Oh, ’Lizer! dear ’Lizer!  Mrs. ’Ennery ’Awkins.’  Harry sings it well, too; but I say, Thad, you ought to hear the nurse sing it.  It’s great.”

“I should think it might be.”

“She has the accent down fine, you know.”

“Sort of born to it, eh?”

“Yes; you can’t cultivate that accent and get it just right.”

“I’ll do ‘Dear Old Dutch’ for yer,” suggested Harry.  “Hi likes thet better ’n ‘Mrs. ’Awkins.’”

So Harry deserted “Mrs. ’Awkins” and sang that other pathetic coster-ballad, “Dear Old Dutch,” and, to the credit of Harriet, the nurse, it must be said that he was marvellously well instructed.  It could not have been done better had the small vocalist been the own son of a London coster-monger instead of the scion of an American family of refinement.

Thus the day passed.  Jennie proved herself quite as proficient in the dialect of Seven Dials as was Harry, or even Harriet, and when she consented to stand on a chair and recite a few nursery rhymes, there was not an unnoticed “h” that she did not, sooner or later, pick up and attach to some other word to which it was not related, as she went along.

In short, as far as their speech was concerned, thanks to association with Harriet, Jennie and Harry were as perfect little cockneys as ever ignored an aspirate.

The visit of the Bradleys, like all other things, came to an end, and Bessie, Thaddeus, and the children were once more left to themselves.  Teddy junior, it was observed, after his day with Harry, developed a slight tendency to misplace the letter “h” in his conversation, but it was soon corrected, and things ran smoothly as of yore.  Only—the Only being the natural sequence of the But referred to some time since—Mr. and Mrs. Perkins changed their minds about the French nurse, and it came about in this way:

“Thaddeus,” said Bessie, after the Bradleys had departed, “what is the tile of a rockin’-’orse?”

“I don’t know.  Why?” asked Thaddeus.

“Why, don’t you remember,” she said, “young Harry Bradley accused Jennie of pulling out the tile of his rockin’-’orse?”

“Oh yes!  Ha, ha!” laughed Thaddeus.  “So she did.  I know now.  Tile is cockney for tail.”

“Did you notice the accent those children had?”

“Yes.”

“All got from the nurse, too?”

“True.”

“Ah, Teddy, what do you think of our getting a French maid, after all?  Don’t you think that we’d run a great risk?”

“Of what?”

“Of having Ted speak—er—cockney French.”

“H’m—yes.  Very likely,” said Thaddeus.  “I’d thought of that myself, and, I guess, perhaps we’d better stick to Irish.”

“So do I.  We can correct any tendency to a brogue, don’t you think?”

“Certainly,” said Thaddeus.  “Or, if we couldn’t, it wouldn’t be fatal to the boy’s prospects.  It might even help him if he—”

“Help him?  If what?”

“If he ever went into polities,” said Perkins.

And that was the object-lesson which a kindly fate gave to the Perkinses in time to prevent their engaging a French maid for the children.

As to its value as a lesson, as to the value of its results, those who are familiar with French as spoken by nurse-instructed youths can best judge.

I am not unduly familiar with that or any other kind of French, but I have ideas in the matter.

THE CHRISTMAS GIFTS OF THADDEUS

That you may thoroughly comprehend how it happened that on last Christmas Day Thaddeus meted out gifts of value so unprecedented to the domestics of what he has come to call his “menagerie”—the term menage having seemed to him totally inadequate to express the state of affairs in his household—I must go back to the beginning of last autumn, and narrate a few of the incidents that took place between that period and the season of Peace on Earth and Good-will to Men.  Should I not do so there would be many, I doubt not, who would deem Thaddeus’s course unjustifiable, especially when we are all agreed that Christmas Day should be for all sorts and conditions of men the gladdest, happiest day of all the year.

Thaddeus and Bessie and the little Thad had returned to their attractive home after an absence of two months in a section of the Adirondacks whither the march of civilization had not carried such comforts as gas, good beds, and other luxuries, to which the little family had become so accustomed that real camp-life, with its beds of balsam, lights of tallow, and “fried coffee,” possessed no charms for them.  They were all renewed in spirit and quite ready to embark once more upon the troubled seas of house-keeping; and, as they saw it on that first night at home, their crew was a most excellent one.  The cook rose almost to the exalted level of a chef in the estimation of Thaddeus as course upon course, to the number of seven, each made up of some delicacy of the season, came to the table and received the indorsement which comes from total consumption.  They were well served, too, these courses; and the two heads of the family, when Mary, the waitress, would enter the butler’s pantry, leaving them alone and unobserved, nodded their satisfaction to each other across the snow-white cloth, and by means of certain well-established signals, such as shaking their own hands and winking the left eye simultaneously, with an almost vicious jerk of the head, silently congratulated themselves upon the prospects of a peaceful future in a domestic sense.

“That was just the best dinner I have had in centuries,” said Thaddeus, as they adjourned to the library after the meal was over.  “The broiled chicken was so good, Bess, that for a moment I wished I were a bachelor again, so that I could have it all; and after I got over my first feeling of hesitation over the oysters, and realized that it was September with an R—belated, it is true, but still there—and ate six of them, I think I could have gone down-stairs and given cook a diamond ring with seven solitaires in it and a receipted bill for a seal-skin sacque.  I don’t see how we ever could have thought of discharging her last June, do you?”

“It was a good dinner,” said Bessie, discreetly ignoring the allusion to their intentions in June; for she had a well-defined recollection that at that time Bridget had given signs of emotional insanity every time she was asked to prepare a five-o’clock breakfast for Thaddeus and his friends, to the number of six, who had acquired the habit of going off on little shooting trips every Saturday, making the home of Thaddeus their headquarters over Sunday, when the game the huntsmen had bagged the day before had to be plucked, cleaned, and cooked by her own hands for dinner.  “And it was nicely selected, too,” she added.  “I sometimes think that I’ll let Bridget do the ordering at the market.”

“H’m!  Well,” said Thaddeus, shaking his head dubiously, “I haven’t a doubt that Bridget could do it, and would be very glad to do it; but I don’t believe in setting a cook up in business.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean that I haven’t any doubt that Bridget would in a very short time become a highly successful produce-broker with bull tendencies.  The chicken market would be buoyant, and the quotations on the Stock Exchange of, say, B., S., and P.-U.-C.—otherwise, Beef, Succotash, and Picked-Up-Codfish—would rise to the highest point in years.  Why, my dear, by Christmas-time cook would have our surplus in her own pocket-book; and in the place of the customary five oranges and an apple she would receive from the butcher a Christmas-card in the shape of a check of massive, if not graceful, proportions.  No, Bess, I think the old way is the best.”

“Perhaps it is.  By-the-way, John has kept the grounds looking well, hasn’t he?  The lawn doesn’t seem to have a weed on it,” said Bessie, walking to the window and gazing out at the soft velvety sward in the glow of twilight.

“Yes, it looks pretty well; but there’s a small heap of stuff over there near the fence which rather inclines me to believe that the weeds have been pulled out within the last few days—in fact, since you wrote to announce our return.  John is an energetic man in an emergency, and I haven’t a doubt he has been here at least once a week ever since we left.  I’ll keep a record of John this fall.”

And so the two contented home-comers talked happily along, and when they closed their eyes in sleep that night they were, upon the whole, very well satisfied with life.