'
"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.
"'I bring him to you because I trust you,' she said as plainly as looks
can speak. 'Downstairs they handle him all the time, and it is not good
for kittens to be handled. Here he is safe from harm, and here he shall
remain,' After a few weak remonstrances, the futility of which I too
clearly understood, her persistence carried the day. I removed my
clothing from the closet, spread a shawl upon the floor, had the door
taken from its hinges, and resigned myself, for the first time in my
life, to the daily and hourly companionship of an infant.
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