"
"That's what they would wish to make Babie like!" said her elder
sister.
"But you'll not let anybody teach me but you, dear, dear Mother
Carey," entreated the child.
"No, indeed, my little one." And just then the boys came rushing in
to their evening meal, full of the bird's nest that they had been
visiting in their uncle's field, and quite of opinion that Kenminster
was "a jolly place."
"And then," added Jock, "we got the garden engine, and had such fun,
you don't know."
"Yes," said Bobus, "till you sent a whole cataract against the house,
and that brought out her Serene Highness!"
The applicability of the epithet set the whole family off into a
laugh, and Jock further made up a solemn face, and repeated—-
"Buff says Buff to all his men,
And I say Buff to you again.
Buff neither laughs nor smiles,
But carries his face
With a very good grace."
It convulsed them all, and the mother, recovering a little, said, "I
wonder whether she ever can laugh."
"Poor Aunt Ellen!" said Babie, in all her gravity; "she is like King
Henry I. and never smiled again."
And with more wit than prudence, Mrs. Buff, her Serene Highness, Sua
Serenita, as Janet made it, became the sobriquets for Aunt Ellen, and
were in continual danger of oozing out publicly.
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