Page:Diary of a Pilgrimage (1891).pdf/237

 character, but has rather an exhausting effect upon the rest of the family. We limit her now to seven hundred questions a day. After she has asked seven hundred questions, and we have answered them, or, rather, as many as we are able, we boycott her; and she retires to bed, indignant, asking:

"Why only seven hundred? Why not eight?"

Nor is her range of inquiry what you would call narrow or circumscribed at all. It embraces most subjects that are known as yet to civilisation, from abstract theology to cats; from the failure of marriage to chocolate, and why you must not take it out and look at it when you have once put it inside your mouth.

She has her own opinion, too, about most of these matters, and expresses it with a freedom which is apt to shock respectably-brought-up folk. I am not over orthodox myself, but she staggers even me at times. Her theories are too advanced for me at present.

She has not given much attention to the matter of babies hitherto. It is only this week that she has gone in for that subject. The explanation is—I hardly like mentioning it. Perhaps it—I don't know, I don't see that there can be any harm in it, though. Yet—well, the fact of the matter is, there is an "event" expected in our family, or rather, in my brother-in-law's; and there! you know how these things get discussed among relations, and May, that is my niece's name, is one of those children that you are always forgetting is about, and never know how much it has heard and how much it has not.

The child said nothing, however, and all seemed right until last Sunday afternoon. It was a wet day,