“You must give your mind to it more,” said Mrs. Henfrey, “and try to hit the joints.”

“It’s full of bones,” exclaimed Valentine in a deeply-injured voice.

“Well, laddie,” said Miss Christie, “and if I’m not mistaken, ye’ll find when you get more used to carving, that a breast of veal always is full of bones.”

“Nobody must take any notice of him till he has finished,” said Brandon.  “Put up a placard on the table, ’You are requested not to speak to the man at the veal.’  Now, Aunt Christie, you should say, ’aweel, aweel,’ you often do so when there seems no need to correct me.”

“Isn’t it wonderful,” observed Valentine, “that he can keep up his spirits as he does, when only last week he was weighed in the columns of the Wigfield Advertiser and True Blue, and expressly informed that he was found wanting.”

“If you would only let politics alone,” observed Mrs. Henfrey, “the True Blue would never interfere with you.  I always did hate politics,” she continued, with peaceable and slow deliberation.

“They are talking of some Penny Readings that St. George has been giving,” said John Mortimer, for he observed a look of surprise on Laura’s face.

“‘Our poet,’ though, has let him alone lately,” remarked Valentine.  “Oh I wish somebody would command Barbara to repeat his last effusion.  I am sure by the look in her eyes that she knows it by heart.”

“We all do,” said John Mortimer’s eldest daughter.

“Ah! it’s a fine thing to be a public character,” observed her father; “but even I aspire to some notice from the True Blue next week in consequence of having old Nicholas for my gardener.”

“I am very fond of poetry,” said Laura simpering.  “I should like to hear the poem you spoke of.”

Thereupon the little girl immediately repeated the following verses:—­

     “If, dear friends, you’ve got a penny
        (If you haven’t steal one straight),
      Go and buy the best of any
        Penn’orth that you’ve bought of late.

     “At the schoolroom as before
        (Up May Lane), or else next door
     (As last Monday) at the Boar,
        Hear the Wigfield lion roar.

     “What a treat it was, good lack! 
        Though my bench had ne’er a back,
      With a mild respectful glee
        There to hear, and that to see.

     “Sweetly slept the men and boys,
        And the girls, they sighed meanwhile
     ’O my goodness, what a voice! 
        O my gracious, what a smile!’”

The man with no ear for music feels his sense of justice outraged when people shudder while his daughter sings.  Why won’t they listen to her songs as to one another’s?  There is no difference.

With a like feeling those who have hardly any sense of humour are half-offended when others laugh, while they seem to be shut out for not perceiving any cause.  Occasionally knowing themselves to be sensible people, they think it evident that their not seeing the joke must be because it is against them.