in the pursuit, prances sideways on its hind legs with ridiculous
agility and zeal. It makes a vast pretence of climbing the rounds of a
chair, and swings by the curtains like an acrobat. It scrambles up a
table leg, and is seized with comic horror at finding itself full two
feet from the floor. If you hasten to its rescue, it clutches you
nervously, its little heart thumping against its furry sides, while its
soft paws expand and contract with agitation and relief:--

"'And all their harmless claws disclose,
Like prickles of an early rose.'


"Yet the instant it is back on the carpet it feigns to be suspicious of
your interference, peers at you out of 'the tail o' its e'e,' and
scampers for protection under the sofa, from which asylum it presently
emerges with cautious, trailing steps as though encompassed by fearful
dangers and alarms."

Nobody can sympathize with her in the following description better than
I, who for years was compelled by the insistence of my Pretty Lady to
aid in the bringing up of infants:--

"I own that when Agrippina brought her first-born son--aged two
days--and established him in my bedroom closet, the plan struck me at
the start as inconvenient. I had prepared another nursery for the little
Claudius Nero, and I endeavored for a while to convince his mother that
my arrangements were best. But Agrippina was inflexible. The closet
suited her in every respect; and, with charming and irresistible
flattery, she gave me to understand, in the mute language I knew so
well, that she wished her baby boy to be under my immediate protection.