The Other Baby at Rudder Grange

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I sang, still walking up and down the room with a long, slow step, swinging the baby from side to side, very much as if it were grass-seed in a sieve, and I were sowing it over the carpet.

When the bottle came, I took it, and began to feed little Pat. Perhaps the presence of a critical and interested audience embarrassed us, for Jonas and Pomona were at the door, with streaming eyes, while Euphemia stood with her handkerchief to the lower part of her face, or it may have been that I did not understand the management of bottles, but, at any rate, I could not make the thing work, and the disappointed little Pat began to cry, just as the whole of our audience burst into a wild roar of laughter.

"Here! Give me that child!" cried Euphemia, forcibly taking Pat and the bottle from me. "You'll make it swallow the whole affair, and I'm sure its mouth's big enough."

"You really don't think," she said, when we were alone, and little Pat, with his upturned blue eyes serenely surveying the features of the good lady who knew how to feed him, was placidly pulling away at his india-rubber tube, "that I will consent to your keeping such a creature as this in the house? Why, he's a regular little Paddy! If you kept him he'd grow up into a hod-carrier."

"Good!" said I. "I never thought of that. What a novel thing it would be to witness the gradual growth of a hod-carrier! I'll make him a little hod, now, to begin with. He couldn't have a more suitable toy."

"I was talking in earnest," she said. "Take your baby, and please carry him home as quick as you can, for I am certainly not going to take care of him."

"Of course not," said I. "Now that I see how it's done, I'm going to do it myself. Jonas will mix his feed and I will give it to him. He looks sleepy now. Shall I take him upstairs and lay him on our bed?"

"No, indeed," cried Euphemia. "You can put him on a quilt on the floor, until after luncheon, and then you must take him home."

I laid the young Milesian on the folded quilt which Euphemia prepared for him, where he turned up his little pug nose to the ceiling and went contentedly to sleep.

That afternoon I nailed four legs on a small packing-box and made a bedstead for him. This, with a pillow in the bottom of it, was very comfortable, and instead of taking him home, I borrowed, in the evening, some baby night-clothes from Pomona, and set about preparing Pat for the night.

This Euphemia would not allow, but silently taking him from me, she put him to bed.

"To-morrow," she said, "you must positively take him away. I wont stand it. And in our room, too."

"I didn't talk in that way about the baby you adopted," I said.