“With all my heart, if you will be a brave St.
Martin, stopping as you ride gallantly through the
world to share your cloak with the beggar.”
“It’s a bargain, and we shall get the
best of it!”
So the young pair shook hands upon it, and then paced
happily on again, feeling that their pleasant home
was more homelike because they hoped to brighten other
homes, believing that their own feet would walk more
uprightly along the flowery path before them, if they
smoothed rough ways for other feet, and feeling that
their hearts were more closely knit together by a
love which could tenderly remember those less blest
than they.
DAISY AND DEMI
I cannot feel that I have done my duty as humble historian
of the March family, without devoting at least one
chapter to the two most precious and important members
of it. Daisy and Demi had now arrived at years
of discretion, for in this fast age babies of three
or four assert their rights, and get them, too, which
is more than many of their elders do. If there
ever were a pair of twins in danger of being utterly
spoiled by adoration, it was these prattling Brookes.
Of course they were the most remarkable children
ever born, as will be shown when I mention that they
walked at eight months, talked fluently at twelve
months, and at two years they took their places at
table, and behaved with a propriety which charmed all
beholders. At three, Daisy demanded a ‘needler’,
and actually made a bag with four stitches in it.
She likewise set up housekeeping in the sideboard,
and managed a microscopic cooking stove with a skill
that brought tears of pride to Hannah’s eyes,
while Demi learned his letters with his grandfather,
who invented a new mode of teaching the alphabet by
forming letters with his arms and legs, thus uniting
gymnastics for head and heels. The boy early
developed a mechanical genius which delighted his
father and distracted his mother, for he tried to
imitate every machine he saw, and kept the nursery
in a chaotic condition, with his ‘sewinsheen’,
a mysterious structure of string, chairs, clothespins,
and spools, for wheels to go ‘wound and wound’.
Also a basket hung over the back of a chair, in which
he vainly tried to hoist his too confiding sister,
who, with feminine devotion, allowed her little head
to be bumped till rescued, when the young inventor
indignantly remarked, “Why, Marmar, dat’s
my lellywaiter, and me’s trying to pull her up.”
Though utterly unlike in character, the twins got
on remarkably well together, and seldom quarreled
more than thrice a day. Of course, Demi tyrannized
over Daisy, and gallantly defended her from every
other aggressor, while Daisy made a galley slave of
herself, and adored her brother as the one perfect
being in the world. A rosy, chubby, sunshiny
little soul was Daisy, who found her way to everybody’s
heart, and nestled there. One of the captivating
